My Thoughts Exactly

by Allen Lily

I started singing as a child at school, but discovered music as a young teenager and kept it close to me from then on. I read. I keep notebooks. I’ve got a good eye. I collect textiles, love colour, and decorating or doing up a house doesn’t faze me at all. I exercise but I’m not a natural athlete. I’m a swimmer. I’m strong. I can be tough. I’ve been broken. I’m opinionated. I’m a people-pleaser. I’m a narcissist. I’m co-dependent. I don’t always like being alone, though equally there are times when I can’t bear company. I’m spoilt. I’m needy. I can be a hypocrite. I contradict myself. I can be cold.

My truth is that I didn’t feel nurtured as a child. I felt lost and invisible and often ignored. That lack of care, or what I take to be a lack, has informed much of my behaviour as an adolescent and an adult.

Then it hit me. Oh my God, I thought. I never saw that when I was young. As a child, I didn’t witness any adults in a loving relationship or showing each other affection.

That’s what you learn to do as a child if the two people you love the most appear to have disappeared on you. You become a people-pleaser

then, that one of the things I yearned for as I reached adulthood was to be the centre of attention. Ditto, you could surmise, my being attracted to older men, subsequent co-dependency, not being able to say no, and my habit of people-pleasing, as well as my disregard for authority.

For example, when I went to boarding school for the first time, all the girls had things like Tampax and deodorant. No one gave me that stuff or gave me the talk about how to look after yourself, even in the most basic of ways. I think that’s another reason why I, as an adult, so quickly latched on to men and was, like, You! You’re going to look after me now! As a child, I longed for adulthood, but as I got older, part of me wanted to remain a child so that I could fill up on what I felt had been missing from my life, and that was being looked after.

using promiscuity as a way to shore myself up because it made me feel wanted.