Page 73 of Sad Girl Hours
“So … yeah,” Nell finishes deftly. “While you’re busy thinking about how bad you are at being a person, everyone else – I guarantee – is thinking about how bloody amazing you are at it, and how glad we are that you’re in our lives.”
My voice is so quiet it’s almost not there. “Thank you.”
“Can I ask, though, and please know I’m not asking this in an accusatory way, why did you say you went home because of your grandma? Why didn’t you tell us the truth?”
“Because I didn’t want to lose you guys,” I say quickly. “Icouldn’tlose you guys.”
“Why on earth would telling us you were depressed mean you’d lose us?” she asks, sounding so genuinely confused that I also feel confused for a minute. Why would it? But then the weight of my entire childhood, every relationship I ever had pre-university, presses down on me again. I stare at my trousers while I say the next bit.
“Because, historically, people haven’t reacted well to me being depressed in the past. My parents … they’ve never exactly been loving people – they never neglected me or anything. I’ve just never felt any love from them.”
“If you’ve never felt loved by them, then theydidneglect you,” Nell says fiercely, and I put those words away to think about more later.
“But they were worse when I came back home last year. It was like they were punishing me, pulling away even more. I wasn’t meant to suffer openly like that. It’s not how we Lawrences do things. We don’t make our problems other people’s burdens.”
“Oh, Saffron.” Nell shakes her head. “You’ve got this all wrong.”
“Maybe,” I admit. “But it’s how I was raised. And then, when I was at college, I met this girl. Melanie. I thought I loved her, and she said she loved me too. But, when things got bad for me, she would pull back. She’d make little comments about me being a buzzkill, or about how other people she’d dated would go to that party with her, or wouldn’t cry so often. And then, when she got sick of me, she’d break up with me.”
“Disrespectfully, she sounds like a heartless twat.”
“Yeah. Upon reflection, definitely in heartless-twat territory. But at the time … I wanted to be loved,” I say simply. “Iwantto be loved. And so when things started to get better for me again, and she came crawling back, wanting me to be her shiny, happy girlfriend again, I’d just … let her. I don’t even think I liked her as a person, I just convinced myself I did to prove that I was someone who was worthy of being loved. And then, surprise, surprise, it would happen all over again. And I’d remember that if I let people see every part of me, even the parts that aren’t always a bundle of laughs to be around, then they’ll grow to hate the inconvenience, and so – by extension – me.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Nell
This is making so much sense. All the hiding things away from us, the barrier she put up to keep us all from knowing what she was thinking. Her resistance to autumn and winter. “You couldneverbe an inconvenience.”
“That’s not true, though, is it? Every single time someone’s seen the real me, they’ve felt like they have to try and fix things and cheer me up, or—”
“I’m sorry, I need to stop you there. Has anyone ever really tried to fix things for you?”
“In a way. They’ve tried to make me happy again.”
“For you or for them?”
“I…”
“Also, secondly, it’s not the real you, though, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said every time someone’s seen thereal you. And that is the real you but it also isn’t. The real you is a person who’s capable of feeling the whole spectrum of human emotion because you are in fact – please correct me if I’m wrong – a human. So yes, the real you isn’t happy all the time. Mostly because no one is and, if they were, they would frankly be very irritating to be around. But you’re also not made up of the depression or seasonal affective disorder, Saffron. They’re conditions – they’re not intrinsic to you.”
“I’ve had them for so long, I really don’t know what’s me and what’s the depression. We feel like one and the same.”
“I get that,” I say. “But maybe, if you opened up and let people support you, it wouldn’t feel like they were so much. Have you ever had any help with all this? Any therapy? Medication?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I was put on a waiting list for counselling by my GP, but I never heard back. I might still be on it. Who knows?”
“Figures. Like, God bless the NHS butfuckthe Tory government for making it into such a shambles. We need to reform the whole fucking thing from the ground up. But anyway, right now I want to go back to the whole ‘us hating you if you told us this’ thing. I could never hate you—”
“You don’tknow that, though,” Saffron interrupts, and then so does the guy running the Ferris wheel because we’re at the bottom again and it’s come to a stop.
“All right, ladies, did you have a nice time?”
“Can you take us round again, please?” I say. “Here, this should cover it.” I thrust a couple of notes at him and he takes them, shaking his head.
