and all the rest is talk

you wonder, don't you, how someone like me could possibly be a disappointment. you don't understand, and therefore you think, somehow, that i am exaggerating this.

i am not that good a liar, sir.

you don't know what parents can do, when they really work at it. the opposite of what you feel – you whose parents didn't so much work at it as give you a free rein. i'm not saying that's wrong. i'm not saying that's right. i'm not saying that that's all they've done. i am not here to judge. i am just trying to explain how i feel.

i am practically perfect in every way, in the eyes of a parent. i'm smart. i'm pretty. okay, i drink, but i'm almost always sensible. i did the right and proper thing when i started seriously seeing someone – i went on the pill. i'm going to law school. i've worked HARD for my money. how could someone like that be anything other than a parent's wet dream?

the thing is, there's no such thing as perfect.

the closer to perfect you get, the more you realise this. because you never quite get there. and the fights that should be about staying out late or smoking or whatever it is that normal people get into trouble for – the fights over things a parent wants to control but can't – become different. someone else's parents would forgo the little battles in the hope of winning the big ones. in my world, the little battles become the big ones. for parents who claim to be liberal, mine have one hell of a control issue. bearing in mind that i'm not even at school anymore, we fight over things like seeing my boyfriend on a work night. wanting to quit my job two weeks before my contract was due to run out anyway. not spending enough time expanding my cultural horizons. hanging about with "the wrong crowd" (who have never led me astray, or tried to hurt me. unlike one clever, bright eyed boy i might once have known.)

your whole life becomes a goldfish bowl. i don't even know if my beliefs are my own anymore, or whether they're just things that my parents told me that i've been so conditioned in to believing.


you don't want to study english, you want to study law.
you don't want to pick higher history, you want to study spanish.
you don't want to study maths either. don't be so stupid. you're not a mathematician.
you don't want to stay there.
you don't want to go out with him.
OR HIM.
you especially don't ever want to be yourself. YOU'RE SUCH A DISAPPOINTMENT.

to have all this followed up with – "you're so selfish, you only ever do what you want to do" – is... well, galling isn't the word. i don't really know what is.

i feel like a human sponge. i hardly know what's real any more. the only times i begin to feel real is when i am not there. with my best friends. with my boyfriend, especially. i begin to feel – human. like a real person, rather than my parents' puppet. spouting their ideals, their mantras, mantras they fervently believe in – until they apply to me.


four more months until maybe i can breathe.