This particular post is probably going to be difficult to write, for the time I am about to write about is very disjointed and very disconnected.
I was in so much emotional distress. I had lied to Maddie about how I felt about her, and I was utterly confused. It was truly traumatic.
I had always, and still do pride myself in being an honest person. Everyone tells little white lies from time to time, but this was as far from white as could possibly be.
Maddie had always shown an interest in me, and I felt that she was probably just as confused as I was.
To deal with it – (at least in some fashion) – I went back to how I decided she must have felt the year before when she had been asking my friends how I felt about her, and how out of pure fear I had feigned that I wasn’t feeling anything for her. How she had probably decided that despite her interest, I didn’t feel the same.
But that created a spiral – I now realised that I had lied to her about my feelings twice. Neither time was it intentional, but my lack of courage, my lack of empathy had seen me fail those two big tests in my life.
Worst of all, I had let her down, and possibly – (or even probably) – broken her heart.
I crashed into a deep depression – for the first but not to be the last time in my life.
As I said, I had always prided myself on being a decent and honest person, so to find myself in this position, a position caused by myself? I just couldn’t cope.
I suffered through it for a couple of months before I sought help. My parents knew something was wrong, and to this day they don’t know what it was about. I told them I needed some help, and we went looking for a psychologist I could talk to.
I was only 13.
I felt that a female psychologist would be better for me – I had a feeling a male voice would just go to the “man up, get over it” line, and that’s not what I thought I needed. I needed a real listener, someone with empathy who would listen to how I felt about Maddie, and could give me a female perspective, to try and understand how Maddie might have been feeling.
I spent one hour a fortnight talking. The psychologist we chose was actually more than I could have hoped. Not the stereotypical older person, but a younger woman, perhaps in her late 20’s or early 30’s – I was too polite to ask.
I think her younger age allowed her to more easily relate to “younger romances”, and she was more than helpful with her ability to “get it”. Her tone was always calm and understanding, and she assured me that what had happened wasn’t exactly something unusual, but that I had dug myself into quite an emotional hole.
A hole I needed to climb out of before I could move on.
Her message after three or four months of mostly fortnightly sessions was that when I was ready, I had to fix it. She said Maddie probably still knew that I cared about her, but would have been hurt and confused by my response.
Maybe even as confused as I was.
By now it was the end of the school year, and I decided to take the holidays to pull myself together, and try and fix things in the new year.
It was funny, I thought – that 12 months beforehand, I had somehow managed to convince myself that Maddie was leaving the school, that I was losing her. That I had lost her.
This year, I might have lost her again – but because of my own stupid emotional response to fear.
I did decide it was time to fix it. I had to be honest with Maddie, no matter what her reaction would be.
I wasn’t going to let myself lose her again.
Somehow, I now felt that she was going to be in my life for a long time – but it was up to me to make that happen.