Page 52 of Sad Girl Hours
Nell just looks at me. “For what?”
“Acting differently.”
She shakes her head as if to dismiss my words. “You don’t have to be sorry, but I would like it if you let me help you with whatever it is. Or even just talked to me about it.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t,” I say decisively, wringing my hands together.
“OK,” Nell says. I look at her to see whether she means ‘OK, I’m dropping it’ or ‘OK, but I don’t know why you’re being like this and I’m starting to think you’re not worth the effort’.
Thankfully, when I meet her gaze, she shrugs. “I’m not going to pressure you to talk about anything you’re not ready to. But if and when you are, I’m here. Talking helps. Trust me.”
I say the words without thinking. “Not always.”
Nell scans my face, before breaking away and staring at the wall opposite us, fiddling absent-mindedly with her too-long cuffs. “You know, I didn’t used to talk about things either.”
“You talk about everything,” I say, trying to inject some levity into the situation with some fond teasing.
“Now, yes. Not always. In fact, I used to keep everything in.”
“I can’t imagine that.”
“No, well. Neither can I any more really. When I think back to that version of Nell, she seems like a stranger. Sometimes I forget that that’s what I was like.”
“Whatwereyou like?” I ask, apprehensive but curious.
“Someone that was being hurt so much just by existing in the world that she felt like she had to hurt herself instead to take back control. Someone who knew she was different but didn’t have the language to bridge the gap, so instead she had to stare at the void between the person she was and the person she thought she was meant to be and hope that she’d either figure things out or fall into it before anyone noticed.”
The air in the room feels close. “What … what do you mean?”
Nell smiles sadly at me. “Look. I know I’m mostly very comfy with who I am today, but I definitely wasn’t when I was younger. Even more than most teenagers, I mean,” she adds. “I didn’t get diagnosed as autistic until I was seventeen. Before then, I just thought I was weird, like my energy never matched the people around me. I was either too high or too low. I didn’t dress like everyone else. I was interested in my own weird things. I tried to be like everyone else. I tried not to care about or feel things too much, but I couldn’t do it. So, when I was about fifteen, I started hurting myself.”
I imagine the walls of the room crumbling with the force of how upset that image makes me.
“I couldn’t control how people reacted to me or how intensely I felt things most of the time, but I could control that. It hurt but it was me doing the hurting this time. I was in control. It started small, just a couple of scratches, but it got worse. My dads found out when I was sixteen and got me into therapy, where I had no choice but to either sit in silence – which I’m not great with—”
“I know,” I say with quiet affection.
Nell grins. “Or actually talk about things. From there, we started to piece together why I’d been feeling the way I had. They referred me to the local autism team. I went, successfully passed the autism test, got mycongrats on the ’tismcertificate and everything started getting a little better.”
“Just like that?”
“Not exactly. I was in therapy for two and a bit years – I did a few sessions last autumn so I had support for the transition to uni. It wasn’t as simple as getting my diagnosis and being cured of the way I felt or anything, but it all definitely helped. I had more information. I knew that the issue wasn’t with me or my brain: it was with how the rest of the world interacted with it. And I got to choose whether to be ashamed or proud of who I was.”
“And you chose proud.”
“I did,” Nell says simply.
“And you don’t … hurt yourself any more?”
Nell shakes her head with vigour. “God, no. I have better ways of coping now. I was really lucky that I got the help I needed to stop that before things got any worse.”
“I’m really glad you did,” I say. “I hate that you ever felt that low. You didn’t deserve that. Not at all.”
“No,” Nell says. “I didn’t. No one does.”
