Re-Reading Your Story So Far

During the Victorian Era books became far more affordable. With the improvements to the printing press, national literacy skills, and in general the price of making a book fell. Not only did this mean more people could get their hands on books, but also more people were writing books. To be fair there wasn't a lot to get up too, your choices were needle point, sit  in your house and hope someone drops by, or you could always die of polio writing seemed like a pretty decent pass time. 

Paperbacks became very cheap and people could either by a whole book or some books were sold a chapter at a time. In fact paper backs were so cheap that people would tear out the pages as they finished reading them and throwing them away. 

I feel myself doing this often. I finish a chapter of my life and I was to rip it out and throw it away. Sometimes because it was a difficult time, or  things haven't turned out how I wanted, other times things have all been great but for one reason or another I just find it difficult to look back on that time. 

When a boyfriend broke up with me when i was eighteen it broke my little teenage heart. Of course being eighteen I believed we were in love, the real thing that was going to go the distance and no one had ever had a love like this before. Of course like most teenage loves, surprise surprise, it didn't quite turn out like that. So I decided to start ripping this chapter apart. I changed how I looked, made my hair go from black to bleach blonde, I wore clothes I had never dared to before, changed how I did my make up and removed all traces of him from my life. I told my friends not to ask about him, hell I made sure they didn't say his name around me. A bit extreme now that I look back but I was a heartbroken teen and I wanted to pretend like that year of my life had never involved him let alone revolved around him. 

When my Grandmother died I wouldn't walk down the road her house was on. I didn't want to see a place that was once a place so full of love and family and happiness belong to a stranger who didn't know I use to love running around the bush in the front garden, and they had never attended one of the BBQ's in the back garden where my Grandmother would always rent bouncy castle for the grand children. It was difficult to look at a place where so many memories were formed and now I wasn't allowed in. I didn't want to forget my Grandmother but I preferred her house to become a dream house that exist only in my memories and the physical form doesn't exist any more to me.

Then there are friends, because I so often scrub out sections of my life. I clean out everything I don't want, and just carry forward what I am happy with means I am terrible at keeping in contact.I mean if you rip out a chapter it is hard to go back and just re-read the bits you enjoyed. I had some really close friends as a teenager, but then my Mum sold my childhood home and I no longer had a base in the place they lived it meant it was more difficult for me to stay in contact. Then when I would visit I was almost insulted that they had carried on their life with out me, they had made new friends and got on with their lives and they grew into people with these lives I hadn't been apart of. Although I still cared about them we know longer knew  other, and now when ever I see them post on-line I feel a prang of sadness for a friendship that once meant the world to me and now had faded. I find myself telling the stories of my teen years less as I slowly tear these pages from life. 

However recently things have been going pretty good for me. I have a nice flat, and I get to spend more time with my family. I am talking to my brother more, who has always been one of my favourite people, and I have a boyfriend who is caring and funny always tries to makes me feel good. A website decided my writing was good enough to let me be one of their contributors, and I have even landed a full time job. Then just the other day I was sitting in my room and something suddenly reminded me of one the places I had hated living and I stopped myself thinking about it, while telling myself " no you are trying to forget about that" and like a blinding light I thought to myself NO. 

I am not going to keep ripping pages out of my life. Everything I have been through deserves to be in my story. Things have made me unhappy and angry and sad, but the memories of my past should also be able to make me feel happy and I should be able to enjoy where I have been.

Maybe I should reach out to more people from my past and re-connect or maybe I should remove them from social media and just be happy that I got to experience them in one of my chapters, that were shared what we did when we did. Rather then watching their lives go on wishing I was still part of it. 

I am ready to start my Hardback and stop ripping apart the Paperback.

Rella 

Xx