Notes to Self

by Emilie Pine

I know now that all I really wanted was affection—to be touched or held with love, with understanding, with kindness. And yet this was an impossible ask. I was so filled with the need and wanting of it, and so transparently so, that I think it must have been hard, sometimes, for people to look at me without flinching.

Yet looking back now, though I see what a nightmare our behavior was, I am stunned to realize just how young, and just how vulnerable, we were. One of my friends had severe dyslexia. Though she was in many ways the smartest, and certainly the most resourceful of us, she consistently failed tests and was pushed down the school streaming system. Was it any wonder that she chose not to turn up for her exams? Another friend left school at the same time as me. Her father was abusive to her. This fact was as clear as day to anyone with any sense. But no one did anything. We might have seemed all-knowing, but we were really so innocent. What we needed was help. What we needed was protection. Not to be just let go.

Though I would have been horrified if anyone had ever said to me that a short skirt gave a man a license to rape a woman, in effect this was what I had internalized. I took my punishment because I had a strong sense of having done something wrong, having knowingly broken the good-girl rules. I denied what had happened to me because it was the only way I knew how to survive.

Sex, it turns out, is meant to be—it is—fun. It does not shake the whole wide world, or revolutionize anyone else’s sexual politics, but this different attitude to my physical self, only fully discovered in my thirties really, has shaken my world and, often, my body. I am very much here.

For a long time I have had the recurring and sentimental wish that I could go back to the early 1990s and just hold onto my younger self, tightly, the way she needed, and not pay attention to her protestations that she was “fine.” Because I know what I would say to her. I would embrace her and I would tell her that I know she is lonely, that I know she feels lost, that I know she feels worthless. And then, because she is not me, and because she is me, I would assure her that there is something about her, something amazing, something lovable, something special, something beautiful, something fragile, something strong, something worth fighting for.