Anonymous asked: you post kinda a lot of selfies and... no offense but... its kind of vain :/

teashoesandhair:

Oh dearest, sweet Nonnie. Sweetest Nonnie, with the caramel veil of ignorance and the soft cream centre of misunderstanding. Let me educate you. Allow you to tell me a story.

Our story starts with a picture. Not a particularly nice picture, but a picture nonetheless. Here it is:

Yes, darling Nonnie. That is Anwen. That is me, circa 2009, when I was a mere 17. It’s sort of ironic really that the photograph was taken against the backdrop of the hollow, soulless scenery of North Wales, because when I was 17, I had been in therapy for severe depression, anxiety and trichotillomania for 2 years. Although this picture was taken in the middle of November and it was absolutely freezing, I wasn’t wearing the hat because I was cold. I kept that hat on when we got back to the house we were staying in, and I kept it on when we were on the bus back home. Underneath that hat, I had a huge bald patch that I couldn’t cover. This was caused by the aforementioned condition, trichotillomania, which causes sufferers to pull out their own hair. I was probably born with a genetic predisposition to this condition, but it’s triggered by periods of intense stress, and guess what? Turns out that clinical depression is sort of stressful. It turns out that it hurts to hate yourself and it takes a toll.

What brought on my clinical depression, might you ask? And why did I start this rant with a photograph of me when I was 17, rather than when the depression first set in 3 years before? Well, Nonnie, that would be because there aren’t any photographs of me before I was 17. Not ones that aren’t of me in nappies in a family album, anyway. I didn’t let people take photographs of me from the ages of 13 – 17, because those were the years that made me hate myself.

But I can see I’ve jumped the gun a bit, Nonnie, and we don’t want that, do we? So I’ll take you back to the time I was 11. I’ll take you back to my first day of high school, when I turned up weighing 80lbs and standing at 4ft 9, with my tangled, unpulled hair falling down my back, ready to fit in. I thought I was going to be OK. I thought people would like me here. And they didn’t, of course. It turns out that it’s not OK to be intelligent above your peers in high school – the kids idolise you for it in primary school, but when you hit puberty, knowledge is an albatross. It’s a burden. You bear it rather than carry it. At primary school, kids would corner me and ask me to tell them the story of the Odyssey and explain how semi colons worked, and so I told them. At high school, kids made fun of me when I answered questions, and so I was silent. It didn’t help that I had a huge nose, bad acne and gappy teeth. It didn’t help that I had a posh voice. Nothing helped.

I don’t really think I need to explain to you how bullying works. I think we’ve all been there somehow; we’ve all seen it or experienced it or heard about it, and we all know how it works. We don’t all understand it, sure, but I can’t make anyone understand. I can’t explain how it feels to be tripped in the corridors, to be spat on down staircases, to be pushed into roads, to have boys tell you that they want to fuck you fuck youfuckyou because you’re fucking gross and no-one else will, to have girls tell you that you’re going to be alone forever because you’re so fucking ugly, Jesus Christ, they wouldn’t leave the house like that, to have girls and boys chase you home and throw things at you until you bleed in and out, to sit in the toilet cubicles at lunchtime and sob sobsob yourself raw, totally raw and empty and to shell yourself out and pray to any God that there is – please, God, please, I’m not asking for much, for anything really, just for this – for this to stop. Please. Make this stop, because my name is written on the wall and I can’t wipe it clean and the lights are going out and there is nothing here, nothing at all, and I was never this wretched before. I was never this ugly when people couldn’t see me.

I can’t make you understand how it felt for this to be every day, day in day out, for five years. For you to start high school as bright as a button and to hit 16 trying to decide when exactly your world ended.

No, I can’t make anyone understand that. How can I? But I can make you understand how it made me feel, Nonnie, because it’s basic psychology. Just think about it. You take someone aside and you put out their eyes, and you tell them that the sky is green. No it isn’t, they scoff, the sky is blue. I know. I’ve seen it. You ignore them. You tell them once more that the sky is green. The sky isn’t green, they say, or at least it wasn’t the last time I saw it. You tell them that the sky is green. Over and over again, you tell them that the sky is green. Eventually, the seed is planted. They can’t see the sky. How do they know that it’s blue? Just because they thought it was once – well, maybe they misremembered, or maybe someone else’s green is their blue, or maybe, just maybe they were always completely wrong. And then the sky might as well be green, because they’re not so sure that it’s blue any more.

That’s all it takes, Nonnie. It’s germination. You plant the seed and you heap earth upon it and you watch it fester and grow until it takes root in all the corners of someone’s mind, and there’s no getting rid of it. Not once you give them back their eyes and they see that the sky is blue, because maybe it was green for the time they were blind. Maybe it was. And I don’t need to tell you that for years my sky was green.

And I don’t have time now to tell you how I got out of that state. I don’t have time to tell you how I cast myself in my own mould from the clay they made of me, because I would need a book to tell that story. Sometimes, I am in awe that I can tell it at all. I am in awe that I can look in a mirror and see myself, because for the longest time I could only see the girl who spat on me and the boy who told me he’d fuck the ugly out of me and the group of boys who told me they’d rather fuck anyone on Earth but me. Sometimes, I am so proud of myself that it hurts. I am so, so proud that I am here now, and I am not stuck there. Not at all. And there are days where I look at myself and I see the girl who pushed me in front of a car and the girl who spread rumours that I had betrayed my best friend, but more often than not, I don’t see them at all. They don’t even ghost in me any more.

I will never, not ever and not once apologise for anything that you may perceive as vanity. I will never apologise for liking myself – even loving myself – when I have fought tooth, claw and nail to even accept myself the way I am. I will never sully my tongue with an apology for telling the world that yes, I am here, and yes, I am happy with my crooked teeth and my crooked nose and my crooked smile. I am not sorry for it. I’m only sorry that I wasn’t always happy with this body. I’m only sorry that I let myself look at it and see the ghosts of others in the bones beneath my skin where there was only marrow. I’m sorry to my sister that I didn’t believe her when she told me that I was fine the way I was, and I’m sorry that I had to hold her as she cried sobs of relief when she realised that I finally believed her. I’m sorry to my mother that she had to hold my hand in that hospital bed, and I’m sorry to my father that he drove 200 miles to see me when I stopped breathing. But most of all, I’m sorry to myself. I’m sorry to myself that I etched things in my skin that shouldn’t be there. I’m sorry that I can never get back those years and tell the Anwen from 2009 that she was fine; baldness and crooked teeth and posh voice included, she was fine. She deserved to be loved, and especially by herself.

But to you, Nonnie? I have no apology. None at all.

I do have this, though: