Rubato - Scarlett Johansson

Part 6

Theo's POV

Someone once told me that people with anxiety don't get to have a train of thought. Rather it's more like they have seven trains on four tracks that narrowly avoid each other when all paths cross and all the conductors are screaming at each other. It was the first time I felt someone understood what was going on in my head. That was two years ago. Before then I don't think anyone truly understood what went through my mind. The person who told me wasn't even trying to help me, they were describing their own anxiety, but the words have stuck with me. It was the perfect summary of what my mind is like.

I was eight when I was first told I wasn't good enough, well at least by someone other than family. A teacher decided I was too lazy and too dumb to mark my work. She was wrong, I am neither lazy nor dumb. Just dyslexic. Then when I was eleven I was given special anger management classes, because I was angry. I mean I was just a child and had already been labelled fundamentally different to everyone else, I think I just needed someone to explain to me that it was ok that my brain was different to everyone else's. What I definitely didn't need was yet another reminder that I wasn't good enough. Another reminder that I was different to my peers. Those anger classes led to a diagnosis of ADHD. As if I wasn't angry enough. As if I wasn't different enough. As if I wasn't already not good enough. I just kept getting labelled with all these different things, and it was overwhelming and confusing. I wasn't even at secondary school when this all happened. 

No one even took a second to explain what all the terms meant. No one thought, oh we are diagnosing this child with all these issues, maybe we should take a minute to tell her there isn't anything wrong with her, that she is just as good as everyone else, she's just wired differently. That her brain just works a little different. Heck, if I wasn't thirteen I would probably not still be where I am today. That doesn't mean I shouldn't have had someone explaining all this to me. I didn't learn what any of my diagnoses meant until I was fifteen and researched them myself.

When I was thirteen, right before I started busking and met Ray, I actually broke my hand in a fit of anger. Rhys pissed me off at a family friend's party and I chased him, but he was too fast, so naturally, I punched the brick wall when I couldn't punch him. Then I go angry I punched a wall, so naturally, I punched it again, and then again and then again. I punched it until someone dragged me away to A&E. Not even that was enough for anyone to explain to me what was going on in my head.

The anxiety didn't start till I was eighteen, nearly nineteen. I was already gaining a lot of popularity and suddenly I was having to deal with all this recognition while being in a whole new country, miles away from my family and friends. Not only that but I was the new girl in Julliard and it was instantly clear that I didn't fit in. As a double major, I was in the minority at Julliard. Julliard very rarely allows someone to do a double major due to the intensity of their courses, so the fact that they were allowing me to got me even more attention. It felt like everyone was just waiting for me to fail. People knew who I was, that I was already in the music industry, and they made sure I knew that they knew me. To them, I was just the little British pop star now at the institute for music, and people weren't shy about their opinions of my likelihood of failure. It all became too much too soon and I couldn't cope.

I was a mess and my brain was quickly becoming my number one enemy as if it hadn't been my enemy my whole life. There were four months were I seriously reconsidered everything. The feeling to give up became overwhelming. To this day I'm still not sure what I would have been giving up, but the option was always there. I have no idea how far I would have gone to give it all up and that thought still scares me slightly. There were times when I didn't leave my room at all, didn't eat, didn't drink, and didn't sleep, I wasn't even living really. I just stay there in bed staring at the wall for hours. I couldn't even bring myself to write or play music. I was just stuck in silence, yet it was never quiet because my thoughts never stopped. I was just there and I didn't want to be. I. Felt. Nothing.