the paint strokes of a romantic fraud

closure for my teenage heartache: a desire to be loved should never outweigh a desire to live

You’ve seen the tweets and TikToks, I’m sure, saying “Either we’re getting married or this will be the worst heartbreak of my life”. Young women online, finding nice men for the first time, and becoming entirely convinced that this had to be it, their one chance at a good relationship, terrified of a bad outcome where they end up alone again. I said this exact sentence to my ex-boyfriend about 3 months into our relationship. We lasted just over a year, and in hindsight, the entire thing seems a little pathetic.
Be kind to yourself, Sophie.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t pathetic. But I really, really wanted it to work out - he was my best friend. I was so excited about it when we first started dating because he was the first man to make me feel like more than a piece of meat. He wanted to date me because he thought I was funny and witty and kind. We were friends for a long time before we dated; he thought he knew who I was and still wanted to be with me, and that was more than enough for me to take the compliment and run with it. I wanted to be the person he thought I was.

I realise now that I latched on so hard because I didn’t believe in the way he saw me. At all. I desperately wanted it to be true, but the reality was that I had orchestrated his entire perception and created a misshapen cutout in his (and everyone else’s) life for myself to cram into. It almost looked like me, but I never truly fit. My elbows and knees and heart would cramp up regularly as I woke up every morning and stuffed myself into it. And as uncomfortable as it was, I have to hand it to myself; it was a damn impressive fake. I was freshly 18, had just been kicked out of my childhood home for good, mourning parents that weren’t. I was less than a year out of a deeply abusive relationship, in the aftermath of which I lost every single person I knew, bar my best friend. I was cold and lonely, in a world I felt I had no real understanding of, and I was absolutely terrified of letting anyone in. So, I spun a world for everyone around me in which I was a confident, funny, bouncy, egotistical maniac. And it worked. Men loved it. There were streams of messages on Instagram and Hinge, and I gossiped about it at length with my friend group at the time. The guys in the friend group (including my ex-boyfriend) fell for it. They’d bring me sushi when I said I was hungry, or cycle round at 1AM to get high and watch TV because I said I was lonely. I was a queen. Everything I wanted, I could get. I was rarely alone. And yet, I’d never felt so lonely. I’d never felt so empty. I was so disconnected from everything and everyone, it was like watching someone else’s life alone at the cinema. And at 3AM one night that winter, alone in the dark, I made handmade cards to my friends with personal goodbyes and I tried to kill the girl I was tired of watching.

It didn’t work, obviously. I woke up the next day, drowsy and quiet. I was desperate for something to be different. I knew I wouldn’t come out alive if something didn’t change soon. So when my friend started to come over more, telling me about his world with a perfect family and a bright future, I weaved myself into it. He already loved me, so it wasn’t difficult. He had everything I’d ever wanted for myself - he had a real, substantial life of beautiful, bright blue skies, while mine was the smokey reds and blacks and oranges that choked the air on the day that our local seaside hotel burnt to the ground. He baked vegan cakes with his mum and went to the cinema with his dad. He was clever. He was sure of who he was. He had had the same friendship group since he was 12. He was always happy. Everything about him was safe, and I couldn’t remember what safety felt like. I was tired of running from everything, and his life seemed like what I was supposed to be running towards. So when he told me he wanted to be with me, I nestled myself into the creases of his childhood blankets and tried my best to blend in with the baby blues. I loved his life, and he was kind and good, so I loved him. I have always loved him. For a while, I was in love with him, too. I wrote poetry about his big, childlike coat, I asked him about his day, I baked him shortbread. I was convinced I could weave this web and live in it forever.

And it worked: for the first time since I can remember, I was safe. I was safe from rowdy drunk men in bars. I was safe from worrying about dying alone. I was safe from having to think about myself, and my life, and who I really am, because there was a person who took me however I was, albeit sometimes with a grumble. I convinced myself that this was all I needed. He had a dead-set good future, and if I could grab onto this train’s handrail and take myself with it, I’d be safe from my own. It was this complete release of my own life in order to create one that I thought he wanted that rendered me completely soulless without him. I asked him his opinion before doing anything, even if I knew what I wanted. I bought and wore clothes I thought he’d like. I’d eat meals he liked. I’d get him to teach me games he played. He became the first step I had to take before tottering towards any sort of future. He was my baby steps.

As quickly as I could, I painted a picture of perfect domesticity; we moved in together. A picture of weekly meal plans, taking out the bin, two baked potatoes on a Wednesday night. But when we settled in, and the picture was complete, I realised I had used entirely blue paint. The red acrylic sat untouched in the palette. It was entirely my doing; my brushes, my canvas, my paints, but when I sat back and looked at it, it was nothing like I thought it would be. I had fancied myself a Claude Monet, but when I finished the forgery, I realised I was nothing of the sort. I was Mary Barnes, alone in the basement of Kingsley Hall, relinquishing control and regressing to a child in exchange for giving up a life in the agony of knowing exactly how mad she was. I was Zdzislaw Beksinski, picking up oils and creating something nauseatingly expressive, then refusing to analyse what any of it means, or even give it a name. And when I felt the world I built start to fall apart I’d ask myself over and over again, what am I so afraid of? As if I didn’t already know. As if I didn’t see the fleshy, faceless, charcoal creatures crawling disjointedly across my canvas. As if I didn’t feel the horrible Stygian nothingness writhing anxiously through my stomach whenever someone mentioned their partners and their future. As if I didn’t see the rot eating away at the foundations I had built, creeping its way into our kitchen until the food we brought home went black before I could get it into the fridge.

But still, I stayed. Don’t call me selfish. I know it was unfair to hold back a boy from finding somewhere he actually belonged, and I know it was unfair to be angry at him for realising the truth and ending it first. But what would you do? Tell me, honestly. If you had spent your entire childhood alone in a silent house, if you grew up in silence, watching your friends from a distance, too uncomfortable to say anything real, if you learnt to hold a mirror to everyone around you to avoid learning who you were, just in case you couldn’t stand her, and then finally you find a space that is easy, gentle and safe. Somewhere with love (and really, I promise, there was love). Somewhere you can rest, because you understood your role in the world you built. Wouldn’t you stay? Wouldn’t you lay on the hardwood floor and listen to the heartbeat underneath? Even if the heartbeat belonged to the person you were meant to be? I was scared. I was alone. I have been alone since I was a child, and I had reached a point in my life where I knew I could not survive if it didn’t change. I’ll say it again, I will scream it, because as I cry behind this keyboard with sympathy for the girl I was, I realise how human it is, how natural it is to feel it: I WAS SCARED.

To be a real, whole, human person seems like an impossible thing. To listen to people talk to you, to take a moment to note how it makes you feel, and to reply in a way that feels real, feels like something you would say, sounds so easy, and feels so agonisingly impossible. I do not spend my time in the shower thinking about what I said to the stranger in the pub bathroom three years ago and if I could have been less awkward, because I don’t feel like that was me. And it wasn’t me when I bought a long, wine red, frilly skirt to wear on a date with the man I thought I’d marry. I was desperate to be that person, but it wasn’t me. And it wasn’t me when I sat behind a reception desk in a rental building dealing with Southern Water bills for 229 apartments, either. I know that that wasn’t me. But really, that’s all I know.

That is the truth of it: I don’t know who I am. And as I type this out, and read it back, I have to ask. Are you kidding? Are you really, honestly kidding? How ridiculous! How abysmal! I’ve wasted years of my life morphing and moulding myself into a person I do not believe in because of how much easier it is to live for someone else than live for yourself. Especially, I realise, when you grow up deep in the caves of mental illnesses, with thousands of unlit routes and the ever-present, distant rumblings of cave mouths closing off after one misstep, tiptoeing around the terror that you’ll go down the wrong tunnel and end up staring a monster dead in the face as it wraps itself around you and you realise you have no other option than to just give up and hope you’ll win the reincarnation lottery. It is scary, of course it is. To be alone in the world with no support. It’s terrifying, and it is an entirely normal, human reality. There are thousands of people alone and scared, and there are thousands more who dug their way out of the hole.

I have made a series of mistakes in my life in an effort to run away from the big, scary, inevitable job I’ll one day have to face: learning to be comfortable with who I am. And if I sit here, and I let myself dance with the discomfort of my past, I realise it is because I am afraid of there being truth in the age-old nurture philosophy. My mother was cold and unloving. My father was a cowardly drunk. I devoted my teenage years to two very angry men, who were so unhappy in their own lives that they sucked any joy I created for myself out through my bone marrow. I was an IV drip for the love they never received, and the more they took, the less I could muster for myself (and clearly, that carried over to my last boyfriend). If I am the sum of the people who have loved me, then I am angry, lonely, ruthless, judgemental, uncaring, aggressive, hostile, rude, unhappy, and very very very alone. And maybe I am, if I was so desperate to ignore the rot that festered between my last boyfriend and hold him back like this (although, in my honest defence, he stands by the fact that I was good to him). But this sad, angry person is not who I want to be.

Fall Out Boy told me at 9 years old, you are what you love, not who loves you. Now that I am sitting here in the rubble of the house I built and destroyed, I am looking around at all the empty space, and all the paths in front of me, and I realise it is my choice. It is up to me to decide what has built me up. Maybe my mother wasn’t there for me when I needed her, but when my cousin cried about the mean girls at her school, I understood what she was looking for, and I could give it to her. I am not my mother because of my mother. Monet created beautiful, peaceful work, and I can sit in front of his paintings for hours and feel beautiful, peaceful things, but that doesn’t make me feel any less when I marvel at one of Barnes’ works. So why do I want to be Monet? Because his work is the cover of more diaries. Because when you see his painting, Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies, you see a bridge over a pond of water lilies. It is beautiful, and it is swallowable. You don’t have to go any deeper if you don’t want to. You can feel the beauty and the peace and feel content that art has made you feel something. You can come away not having to understand anything more than what you see. But Mary Barnes’ work only means as much to you as it does once you know where it started: a tortured schizophrenic admits herself to an experimental mental institution because she can no longer bear to be in her mind. Psychiatrists encouraged her to regress mentally into an infant, and then she spent her days locked up smearing excreta on her walls, only eating when fed from a bottle, only speaking in babbles and squeals. It stayed like this until a psychiatrist realised she wasn’t just stuck in the headspace of a messy infant, she wasn’t haphazardly creating a human mess; she was painting. So they gave her paints, and it worked. She stopped using her excrement. She started to communicate again. She ate. She eventually was released and became a wonderful, successful painter. Someone understood her, and her life turned around. Her paintings are an insight into an incredibly interesting brain, and when I see them, I feel. I search for meanings, and I try to understand. And it isn’t Monet, and it isn’t as obvious, but to the right people who take their time to understand, her work is meaningful.

Heavy Snowfall by Mary Barnes

I have spent my life desperate to be easily swallowed, and once I had made myself so, and lived a life of it, I can say with certainty: it is the loneliest life to live. There are people in the world who will search for the pieces of my past to understand my present, who will inhale and devour the stories I present to them with excitement to piece together a puzzle. To morph myself into a pill, swallowable and thin, is an insult to the full-course meal, arduously created with love and sweat and care and blood and precision and tears, that I am supposed to be. I am thousands of flavours, even if some are allergic. I am the careless careful strokes of Mary Barnes’ paintings. I am the smokey reds and blacks and oranges that make up the sky when your local hotel burns down.

I am not here to be swallowed. Nobody is here to be swallowed. The fact of the matter is, we’re all just here, and we’ll find some people easier to digest than others. I was so scared I’d never find someone who wanted to consume me, or someone I wanted to be consumed by, that I got rid of the flavours that made up the meal. I let him choke trying to force myself down, and I let myself choke on the way. It wasn’t fair to either of us.

So this is my reflection, I suppose. Giving myself the closure I sought from my new ex that he’d never be able to provide. Perhaps because I never gave him the opportunity to, perhaps because he wouldn’t know how to if I did. I don’t regret any of it. We were a comfort to each other, we were kind. But it was not who I am, and I don’t want to spend another moment being anyone else. As I write, the sky outside is purple in its civil twilight. I’ll watch the world get darker with a comfortable lull, and I’ll feel this part of my life come to an end. I have everything that I need now. I am safe. I can cook my own meals and taste all the flavours. I can paint my own paintings, with neither Monet nor Barnes, and use all the colours. I can build my own life and lay in silence on the red carpeted floor, and I won’t hear any heartbeat but the one in my chest. I have everything that I need now. I am safe. I can rest now.

I will spend the rest of my life becoming what I love. And in this, I will spend the rest of my life in love.