My life

[Cuffs]

I wrote this as a story. I think I wouldn't have been able to type this all out if I didn't use "nicky". I guess I had to distance myself from it a bit so I could actually write this down.


Anyways, I wrote this a few months ago. Before everything started to go bad again. I'm having more and more bad days and I'm a bit scared that I'll slip into depression again. I'm not saying I'm not right now I just don't know it anymore, I don't know what to do or say and I honestly don't feel like trying.

So this is my story (which I've written as 'nicky').

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Everybody has a beginning, something that made them into the person they are today, something that shaped them. That something can be a person, a place, a book they got lost in or even a few simple words. For Nicky, all of those things shaped her but she knew her true beginning lay with two people, Maxime and Thomas.
She honestly doesn't want to admit that those two people had anything to do with the person she is today but she also knows that if this story were to be told that she wouldn't have a choice but to admit that they had everything to do with the person she is now.
So, this is where her story starts, in a small village next to open fields and forests.
It was a beautiful and peaceful village, nothing ever happened there. Everybody knew each other and parents let their kids out to play without having to worry about anything. If something were to happen, another parent would jump in to help. It seemed like the perfect place to raise a child, which is why Nicky her parents had moved there, they wanted Nicky to have plenty of opportunity to play outside. The perfect childhood, that was what is was supposed to be. That was what her parents wanted for her.
Her parents taught her never to talk to strangers or to accept anything from them, knowing there daughter was smart enough to do as they said.
Unfortunately, that's where the first small misfortune happened in her life. A lot of people will tell their children not to with strangers, which is a good thing to teach them, but in teaching children that strangers are the bad guys, they make them vulnerable for the people most likely to hurt them : the people they trust. Did you know that over 80% of the rapes around the world are committed by a person the victim trusts, someone they know well and talk to? No? Neither did her parents.
Two men were friends of Nicky her family. They often came over and talked to her parents, that's how Nicky learned to trust them. After all, her parents trusted them so obviously so did she. As a child, good and bad isn't really all that complicated and if your parents like someone, you'll perceive them as good.
The two men played with her and sometimes with her friends, they were like older friends to her. So when they told her they wanted to become best friends with her, she was ecstatic. She felt strangely proud that she had older friends, something she finds pathetic now, but back then it meant everything to her. She told so many people that her best friends were older guys, hell, she even bragged about it. As a child, she couldn't see anything wrong with it. She was a child, nothing more. Children don't think like adults and many people would find this behavior strange and unsettling but they have to remember she was a child. At that time she was probably six years old.
But I'm going off topic. We were talking about how they became best friends.
Yes, they always went out together. At every chance Nicky got she went outside to play with them. They often played in the woods, building camps and scaring each other. To her, it seemed like life couldn't get any better, and maybe she was right, but she didn't think life could take such a huge turn for the worst.
After she got to know them well and she trusted them completely things started to change, they started to change. It wasn't noticeable at first. Just a few touches here and there, nothing to worry about, nothing to think about. Then they started to make more and more bold moves towards her, telling her that this is what best friends do, that she had to trust them. And why wouldn't she? Why wouldn't she trust them when they told her that? They wouldn't lie to her. At least that is how she thought.
At first she let it happen, the touches, they seemed small and even though something didn't always feel right, it is what you did for friends isn't it? It's what friends do, it's normal. That's how she thought. So she let it happen, she let it happen up until they did something she really didn't want to do. She told them so, she started to scream, to kick, to cry. It didn't matter. It happened anyways. They got their way with her, a girl of only seven years old.
Afterwards they apologized, lied to her and told her that she had asked for it.
She was confused but she didn't say anything. They had hurt her but they were still her friends right? Friends made mistakes. Friends sometimes did bad things but that didn't mean that they were bad people. Yet she cried. She cried until it seemed like she couldn’t cry anymore. It was all so confusing for her, she hated them and yet she loved them, she never wanted to see them again and yet she still yearned for their approval.
The men had been rolemodels for her, she had wanted to be like them. Something like that isn’t easily replaced. So she forgave them. They might have hurt her but it wasn’t their fault, it was an accident and it wouldn’t happen again. It had been her fault, she wouldn't let it happen again.
I’ll not try and get into detail about how she forgave them for even I don’t know it anymore. There were so many excuses, so many ‘reasons’ she saw, but in the end, she forgave them and she put herself in the same situation all over again.
She fought it, of course she did, it hurt and she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to hurt, to feel used.
So, after the second time, she avoided them. She didn’t go to her mother, thinking Thomas might have been telling her the truth when he had said her mother would be disappointed in her. So, avoiding them seemed to be the best thing to do, hiding from her problems. If they couldn’t find her then she wouldn’t hurt.
So it went on. She tried to avoid them the best she could but sometimes she failed. There were times they were waiting for her on her usual route from school and there were times they followed her. This went on for a few years.
She stopped fighting it after a while, not caring what happened to her anymore. So sometimes, when she found herself in a situation she knew she couldn’t control she just let it happen, knowing she couldn’t fight it. She didn’t even cry out loud anymore. It wouldn’t have made a difference. It was like she just gave up living, caring.
Her parents of course knew that something was wrong, she was distant and didn’t want to talk to people anymore. She didn’t go outside to play and stayed locked up in her room at every chance she got. They noticed but she never told them, she couldn’t, she didn’t want to disappoint them.
So as the years passed by she got more and more distant and felt like she was all alone, even if she had a lot of friends. It didn’t matter, she couldn’t tell them, she was alone.
She tried to pray to every god her teacher had told her about. At night she kneeled next to her bed, praying for someone to save her, for someone to help her get out of there. She prayed for the pain to stop, for someone to take notice, for someone to save her. But even that stopped after a while. The gods never answered her, never helped her. Maybe her parents were right and gods didn’t exist. And if they did, why would they let this happen to her, why would they allow it? Was she such a horrible person? Dit she deserve all of this? She didn’t know anymore.
Now, what you have to understand about her situation is that she had trusted those guys for years and she had really gotten to know them in the year that they just hung out in the forrest, before everything happened.
She had never questioned them before. So to her, that hurt, was a betrayal that truly cut her deep. She also didn’t even know what *** was at that age, growing up in a small village with no computer to call her own she didn’t really have a chance to know what it meant.
But that all changed. One day it got too bad, it hurt too much, they had beaten her on top of everything else and they had left her alone in the forrest. She couldn’t even find the strength to stand up in the beginning. So she just lay there, crying.
When she finally did stand up hours had passed. Nobody had seen her and nobody had missed her. Her parents hadn’t even noticed she hadn’t come home at a reasonable hour. She had never felt more isolated from the people she loved.
That night she sat in the shower, letting the water fall on her and she cried. For the first time in over a year, she really cried.
The next morning her parents saw her bruises and confronted her, not taking her silence for an answer any longer. So she did the only thing that she thought she could do, she lied. She told her parents that she was being bullied by the people in her school and that she didn’t want to go back there.
Her parents were pissed. Not at her, but at the school that had allowed their little girl to get hurt.
They gave her a computer, now knowing she really didn’t want to go outside anymore and they started to take steps to ensure the bullying would stop.
Her parents were nice people, but even they were in way over their heads. They wouldn’t be able to stop her from being bullied if she wasn’t even bullied.
It was hard on them, seeing their little girl in so much pain. And sometimes it was too much. Her father started to pay close attention to her and every time she came back home with bruises he locked himself in his room. He had started to drink. After a while it wasn’t just then, it was every day.
Home had been Nicky her safe haven but even that was slowly crumbling apart. Her father started to trow things around the house, angry at the world.
She just locked herself in her room, refusing to talk to anybody. She started to look things up on the internet and found out what *** was, what everything was, what they had done to her, what they were still doing to her.
She wanted to stop it but she didn’t know how, she just wanted everything to go back to the way it was, before they had hurt her, before they had raped her. Rape… The word still hurt her. Such a small word, consistent of four little letters, they hurt.
She started to make up characters, versions of herself but stronger, better, people that weren’t as weak and pathetic as she viewed herself to be.
That’s how she met Maartje, the first real hero of this story.
Nicky had gone on a website for young girls called GoSupermodel. It was a childish website, but then again, she was a child. You could customize your own model and be who you wanted to be. You had a forum and clubs you could make.
She joined one of those clubs and started to write there with her character, Sky. The club became her new safe haven. She and the other people of the club wrote and wrote. It was a way for her to escape reality and the things she had to do. Maartje was there, every day. It was the first person she talked to, the first person she told, the first person that was there for her. Maartje seemed like the only person that understood her, that wanted to understand her. So they talked, they talked while their characters got to know each other as well. Their characters had the most amazing adventures and finally, she could pretend to be a strong person.
It gave her an idea. An escape plan.
She started to make trouble at her school and being a pest to others. People started to dislike her, just like she wanted.
The school called her parents and her parents had a long talk with her. She told them that she couldn’t handle it anymore and that she wanted to move, to move away from the bullies and this neighborhood.
In the end, they moved.
It took a while of course and her brothers weren’t really happy about it but to her it meant that they could never hurt her again.



A new beginning
A new place, a new start. That’s how she saw it. She hadn’t really talked to other people her age in quite some time since it took so long to move but now she could start over, she could try again.
Of cource it wasn’t as easy as she had hoped, it never was.
When she came to the new school she got nerveus around all those people and jumped away everytime somebody touched her. It was like she was living in a constant fear. It was tirering and it all seemed too much.
The other children didn’t understand her behavior, they didn’t know anything about her and just thought it was weird. Being weird never makes you popular. So she was bullied.
Every day she went to school was another day in hell for her. Another day where people would make fun of her for the way she acted, for the way she was.
The only thing that kept het going was Maartje and the club she was in. Here she could write and be someone else, someone stronger. It was an amazing feeling. It was addicting.
When she wasn’t writing she was found reading or watching a series, everything to keep her mind away from this world, the real world. She went on many great adventures in her mind, both with books and her own writing.
Finally she could pretend the world around her wasn’t real and those things had never happened to her.
It’s kind of sad really, she spend half her youth trying to make it go away, to not remember, but that just made everything worse.
Everytime she was walking somewhere she kept looking at the faces of the people around her, afraid that someone would see, that someone would know.
She prefered to stay inside, where it was safe, where they could never find her, where she was at peace.
Of course, nothing stays good. The drinking of her father had escalated and she felt more alone than she ever had felt. Isolated from everybody around her, scared that if she let people in that they would betray her, that they would break her even more than she already was.
She became angry. Angry at herself for being to weak, angry at the world for moving on while she was stuck in an endless loop, angry at her family for not noticing that she was lying, that she needed help.
Every night she cried herself to sleep hoping that maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t wake up.
Slowly her 3 brothers moved out of the house and left her with her father that drank his misery away and her mother who blamed everything that happened on the people around her.
Don’t get me wrong, her parents loved her, they just showed it differently than most.
Her parents started to travel a lot, it was their way of dealing with the misery that seemed to hang around the house, leaving her all alone.
It was strange. Just as she was about to give up, just as the only getaway didn’t seem like enough. Just as she was truly planning to end it all, a girl came into her life.
This girl seemed happy and sweet. She became friends with the strange girl of the school.
This is the second hero of the story. The one that came just in time, the one she truly needed. This girl her name was Charlotte, but she preferred Charlie. She was like a light that shined trough her darkness.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she let Charlie into her life, she even let the girl touch her. It was so strange. The physical contact she had been able to avoid seemed so alien to her. Even if it was just a hand on her arm, it felt wrong and she was fully aware the whole time she touched her, only being able to breath once the hand had gone.
Still, it became better. Every day that went by, every month, seemed like a step closer to the way things should be. She became a little bit happier, she felt a little bit less alone. It seemed like her life would become something better.
She stopped going online to write stories, realizing how wrong it was to emerge yourself in a different world to run away from your problems.
So she tried. She tried to really live. She did everything she thought was expected of a teenager.
She was fourteen and she went to parties, stayed out late and she met people. Yet she never truly trusted anybody. Even Charlie, her best friend, couldn't get too close.
She just was there, pretended to enjoy herself and she tried to run away from her problems like that. She partied about 3 times a week, which really isn't healthy for a fourteen year-old. Yet she couldn't stop herself. If she was there, drinking, trying to pretend she was happy, she wasn't sitting alone at home.
That went on for a while, 2 years to be exact. In that time Charlie went on to a different school and she was left alone with the 'friends' she had from partying. It went on until one day she drank too much and she ended up in the hospital.
It wasn't pretty, she had to call someone to pick her up after she was allowed to leave. She hoped her parents wouldn't find out. They would be disappointed in her. The one thing she hated them to be.
Of course they found out. The bill for the ambulance came and they saw. Yet, they never said anything about it. It was as if they didn't even care. That might have hurt her more than if her parents would yell at her for it.
Now, without Charlie, she was going to a new school. This is where everything went bad again.
She tried. She tried to be someone she wasn't. She wanted to look strong. She didn't. Once again the bullying started, this time by people who didn't back away and would beat her. She left the next year on to another school. Yet the damage had been done. Once again she started to feel depressed. She didn't want to wake up in the morning, she didn't want to do anything. Some days she didn't. She would just lay in bed, thinking. Thinking was bad for her it seemed.
That year she found out that one of her old friends, one of the people Maxime and Thomas hung out with, had killed herself.
I think that was the final straw. She knew why her friend, Laura, would commit suicide. She knew she couldn't have been Maxime and Thomas their only victim.
So she did the only thing she knew to do : she blamed herself. And in blaming herself she started to think about suicide. Not as a passing thought, not as an idea, not as a contemplation. No, she looked up how and she was really going to do it.
What was left? Her parents didn't care. She didn't have any friends. She was alone. Alone in a cruel world. She didn't want to die, not truly, but she also didn't want to live anymore, not like that, she couldn't. She couldn't take another day of that loneliness.
As she was trying to find exactly how to do it someone started to talk to her online. Someone that was interested in her characters. Someone that sounded so exited when they talked. Someone that made her smile every time she read something of her.
This is where we meet our third and last hero. Johanna.
With every message Nicky got from her she started to feel a bit less alone. She started to feel like maybe, just maybe, someone would miss her. It seemed so hard to believe at this point. No, Johanna wouldn't miss her, but she would miss her characters and that had to count for something right?
To her, it meant everything.
Johanna didn't know how much of an impact she had made on a girl her life just by being there. She would never understand how much Nicky cherished every single message she got and every time she read about how much the girl loved one of her characters, she felt like someone wanted her. Wanted to be friends with her, to get to know her, to just accept her.


A better life
This is where everything started to look good for her.
She was at a new school, with people that actually seemed to like her and that didn't seem to mind that she preferred not to be touched by others. She could talk to Johanna in the evening when she sat behind her computer and she finally felt like she could breathe.
She didn't just started to feel better, she still felt bad, but it was getting better.
She started to make plans to leave her country after she graduated. It seemed like the right thing to do. She would make a new start, somewhere far away, where nobody could find her. There she could start again. She could become someone else.
She would be able to let her memories go and start somewhere where nobody knew her. Nothing would remind her of things long past and she would be happy. That was the goal she set up.
It was an amazing start, since she finally could she a future ahead of her, something she hadn't done for years.
Things were finally looking up for her.
Things still went wrong of course, her father had to go away for a while for his drinking and her mother started to drink as well. Yet she tried not to let it bother her, she tried to keep her eyes on the goal and slowly, she worked towards it.