It gets better.

I just finished reading this post on one of my favourite blogs. (Incidentally, friend, I follow your blog too, but I'm not sure if Tumblr is able to count stats of followers from other parts of the blogosphere...)

Anyway...

it got me thinking. 20 years ago is a very long time, and I had to think hard about where I would have been in life. School, particularly early school, is confusing for me because I'm not sure which ages are associated with which grades, and with my birthday in January it means I was 2 ages for every grade. And I associate my elementary school years with grade levels as opposed to my age at the time. Therefore, this required some serious thinking.

Where was I when I was 12? What was my thing?

If I remember correctly, 12 was a rather significant winter for me, in that it was intensely frustrating. And the time I'm thinking of I actually would have been 11, but almost 12. It was just near the end of Christmas "holidays" and I was at an age where the whole staycation thing felt like it just went on too long. I couldn't tell you what I got for Christmas that year, although I'm sure it was awesome. And I'm pretty sure we ate turkey, which was also awesome.

Christmas in Spruce Grove. At the time (as I remember it) I had two real friends, neither of whom I went to school with, and a couple of "friends" at school, people I associated with but with whom I never felt entirely comfortable or certain of my status as friend.

This particular holiday I had invited one of my school "friends" over to play. I'm not entirely sure what we were doing but it involved her wanting something I was using, some sort of inflatable toy like a beach ball maybe? Anyway, she pulled on it while I was trying to inflate it, and as a result the air intake tugged rather sharply on my teeth which hurt quite a bit. This was after I'd asked her repeatedly to wait until I was finished. I responded by hitting. She responded by saying she had to leave.

I felt awful that the chain of events had finished with me hitting her, but at the same time, for whatever reason, she wasn't taking my polite requests seriously.

Looking back I wonder if that was maybe the first example of me having to defend my person against someone who wouldn't take no for an answer, and if perhaps I was so upset by it that it disarmed me against a couple of future entanglements....

I really hadn't thought this would get so deep, now that I'm getting into it.

20 years ago I learned that using violent means to stop an aggressor known to me as someone previously likeable would make me feel like an awful person for hurting the other.

I think this explains why I seemed to have a bottomless capacity for staying in really bad relationships.

(Three cheers for learning something about myself?)

I did eventually figure out how to not stay in bad relationships though. My marriage is amazing, and I honestly don't know what I'd do without my husband. I'm finally in a secure enough emotional space to be able to actually need my husband, as opposed to just being in love with him. And it's amazing to be okay with that.

But back to 20 years ago. The incident left me feeling completely awful. I was convinced I was somehow a bad person (as opposed to a good person who made a poor decision) and when my "friend" gave me the cold shoulder at school the following term, I felt very hurt. I didn't understand why she wouldn't talk about it with me so that we could both have a chance to explain ourselves, learn from our mistakes, and move on. Instead I spent a miserable, mostly friendless (at school) last part of grade 6. I could hardly wait to get to grade 7 and a different school than most of my classmates. It didn't mean making friends would be any easier, just that there would be new people to choose from.

I know how awful a period of life that whole coming of age time can be. But I survived it. And I did make friends. One of my grade 7 friends was maid of honour at my wedding. And as long as you're willing to accept yourself (or try to), learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others, and keep trying... it gets better. Twenty years past the age of 12 you'll be able to take a deep breath and know that it was all worthwhile because now is a pretty amazing time and place to be alive.