“A story that haunts you”
I recently entered a short-story competition from Westport Writers’ Workshop, where the theme was “story that haunts you.” I heard a few days ago that my entry didn’t place, but that means I can share it publicly, and I’m doing so now.
If you prefer to listen to it read out, I did so on Instagram, and you can see it here:
However, if you’d prefer to read the text directly, you can find it below.
Content warning: depression and suicidal ideation.
For most of my life, I’ve known that I’m a monster.
My earliest memories of this certainty were as a weight that hung on me that I couldn’t shift, or a pit opening in my gut threatening to drag the rest of me inside. I’m not aware of when these feelings began. They are as familiar to me as breathing.
As a child, I found the ease with which others interacted quite alien. When I tried, I’d notice people become annoyed, or grow uncomfortable, but I couldn’t understand what I did wrong. As far back as I remember, I thought I must be broken, and that thought festered, fed by every blank expression, every sideways glance, every step away from me.
In time, my reasoning closed in on itself.
Once, when fellow children in my neighbourhood discovered I’d been gifted a new cricket set, they asked to play with me. But, as teams were selected, I was passed over each round. I asked why, given it was my set, I was chosen last.
“We’re saving the best ’til last!” came the reply.
Standing there, knowing that I’d just been lied to, watching them play with my things but avoiding, as much as possible, interacting with me, I felt dreadfully alone… but not terribly wronged. I thought: “What am I, that they think I deserve this?” Because by then I knew I must deserve it. If not, why would such things keep happening?
Looking inside myself for a reason, I found none. I tried to be helpful, worked hard at being kind, worked to be a better person. Good behaviour didn’t make me accepted by my peers. Even with friends I felt the connection tenuous, as if at any moment they might realise what others did, and leave.
By the time I went to college, I knew there was something fundamentally wrong about me that no amount of honesty or decency could make up for. Something others could intuit, if not name. I went about my life in denial of this “truth,” but it often felt as if I were an actor, merely playing the role of a man.
Instead, I was something anathema to reality itself; some horror in a skinsuit; a monster.
The first time a woman showed interest, I was in my mid-twenties. I was surprised—as I liked her—and hopeful. But when this interest ended suddenly, as would several times again, the explanation seemed obvious: she had at last noticed the thing inside of me.
In desperation I asked a friend what it was. “Nothing’s wrong with you that isn’t wrong with everyone else,” he said. If he couldn’t bring himself to tell me, how horrifying must the truth be?
In 2013 I found myself on the edge of a roof terrace recalling every single step that brought me there, but having no idea why I would do so. It took a great exertion of will to pull myself back. I was fortunate that even in my self-hatred, that act concerned me, and I went to a doctor.
To make sense of my life, I had told myself a story, and in that story I was the problem. In reality, I had a problem. I was diagnosed with severe depression and, more recently, with autism and ADHD—which explains a lot of my early awkwardness.
But sometimes, when I look in the mirror, there’s a little burst of that feeling, so ingrained in my patterns of thought I’ll never be completely free of it. I know it’s not true, that I’d made a habit of hating myself, that medication and therapy helped lift me out of the pit. But that pit is still there, and the thoughts that dragged me down are easy to think.
There’s something not right about you.
Others sense it. You can see it in their discomfort.
And you know.
You’ve always known.
And I must remember that story is wrong.