Dear Sarah 1984

Dear Sarah 1984,

I can see you standing in your room in your student flat. You love it. Your posters and cassette player, sharing meals and laughs with the others. You are making lifelong friends. Yet I know that you are wholly convinced that there is something vitally wrong with you. The conviction has been developing for years and today it reaches a new inner certainty.

Well, listen. Eventually you will know it to be a lie.

You have a letter in your hand and you are sobbing. You don’t know what to do with yourself. You are in deep despair.

You already believe that the accumulating evidence shows the truth. You have never been asked out on a date, never been asked to dance, never had sex. One drunken snog with a stranger last year and then a summer of glandular fever that you think must be connected. You are twenty, already falling miles behind your peers. You are drenched in shame about whatever it is that’s wrong with you, that means no one is attracted to you. Toxic searing embarrassment.

In depressed desperation, you wrote to your parents last week to try to tell them how you feel. You are in the thick of yet another unrequited, obsessive crush on a boy, though you don’t tell them that. You would rather die. Instead your letter is full of flippant, jealous references to your flatmates’ adventures in love (as an aside, let me tell you that it will turn out that the boy in question is gay. Unavailable. Safety can be excruciating).

Your mother doesn’t exactly reply. She writes regularly with news of people you know and an account of her week. She worries about you, always asks you if you’re all right. You know she wants to hear you are happy, thriving. Sometimes she writes things like, Don’t worry, I felt the same at your age. She might add, it was awful but you’ve got so much more going for you.

Your father, meanwhile, writes earnestly, warming to his theme amidst pages of jokey anecdotes. Right in the centre is the killer sentence.

I sometimes wonder if we, as a family, don’t give off the right pheromones.

Bang. That’s it then. You are biologically incapable of attracting a mate. A vision of a lonely, loveless, childless future rears, fangs bared.

It doesn’t occur to you to challenge him, to fight back. Dismiss it as the nonsense it is. Serious arguments with Dad are beyond the pale, have never happened. His vehement, sweeping statements go right in, like rusty

darts thrown carelessly around all your life. They’re not aimed at you but they hit anyone in their path. No one tries to stop it. It’s corroded your sense of self-worth to critically low levels.

He goes on to tell you that the family GP recently commented that he must be very proud of you and your brother. Your father reports that he replied, more relieved – instead of both of you being in education, one could be on heroin and one pregnant.

He believes he is being supportive. You believe it, sort of. No one is to blame. All of you are trying hard. This is impossible, slippery. You have been brought up like a sea bird in an oil slick. Your parents – our parents –are covered in oil too. None of you know any different, but it hurts so much to try to fly and you are too wounded to do it yet. You believe it is your own fault. The shame is overpowering.

It isn’t your fault.

You self-harm with vicious, poisonous words, written and spoken to yourself. The vow never to use the word hope. The deliberate, frequent listing of all the ways you are unloveable, unemployable, inferior in every way. Continuous, hurtful, secret comparison. Striving to protect against disappointment by purposefully predicting a bleak unchanging future.

I want to tell you I get it. Finally. You were brought up in a family suffering from multiple forms of serious first and second-hand trauma. Childhood bereavement, estrangement, life-threatening illness. Poverty. War. Abandonment. Who knows what else, if this isn’t enough? The adults in our family coped by wilfully – knowingly and not – ignoring it. By carrying on in blinkers. By avoiding emotions and pretending all was well. They were too scared to do anything else. It worked up to a point.

You grew up never witnessing an argument, or grief, or freely expressed love. Huge reserves of anger, fear and shame were floating around like icebergs. Ordinary, sometimes happy, family life was punctuated by bad moods, listlessness, migraines, silence, faints, strange turns, cruel jokes. Illness real and imagined. An extraordinarily powerful helplessness. Worry took the place of love.

You learnt always to reassure them that you are fine. You present a cheerful, capable front most of the time. You learnt not to cry, or rebel. Never to rock the boat. You learnt that it was impossible to have teenage relationships, make teenage mistakes. You turned to your diary, to books, yearning to be more like other people.

By twenty you are standing there, craving, parched. And truly terrified.

So yes. You’re crying with exceptionally good cause.

Get help.

It’s not easy to find the right help or to ask for it or when necessary to pay for it. But this is essential. You were brought up restricted by oil, gluing your wings down, distorting your limbs. You cannot fix this yourself. You need help from people who can see the oil. Somehow or other, persist. Find ways and people. Give yourself permission. Do it. Learn to tolerate the pain of stretching, the discomfort of removing the oil, of learning to fly. It’s ok.

This route is infinitely better than clinging to the first and smallest things that are thrown your way, in love, work, anywhere. Clinging will keep you slicked in oil, matted and misshapen.

This is extremely hard advice, which you are too distressed to hear right now. Now, find comfort, soothe yourself. Find your friends, show them your father’s letter. They’ll perhaps be shocked, laugh, hug you, probably pour a drink. It’s a start. Keep this letter.

It’s never too late.

Sarah, 2020