Escaping reality.

The shower

The water poured down my body and I instantly felt happier.

I felt safer, calmer, and most of all I felt free.

It was my sanctuary. The one place I had to escape from the world. It was the one place I felt I could really be myself.

It was the one place I felt most confident.

At first I thought it a bad thing that the place I felt most confidence was by myself, and I often found little confidence with other people, but then I realised that confidence isn't about other people, it's about you, as the dictionary says, it is 'a feeling of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities'.

In there, I could sing out any song of my choice and feel like I was on stage, and I could dance around as if I had the body and moves of a model turned dancer.

But in that place, that place of confidence, of appreciation, it was also the same place where I felt most sad.

It was where, for the whole twenty minutes or so that I was in there, I had the burden of looking at my body. My body, which was not that of a model turned dancer.

I would get out, weigh myself, get dressed, and leave as I had entered, sad and self-hating.

I would then go on about my day trying to change my body. But I would soon give up and so I would go on stuck in this ground-hog day cycle. It was my ground hog life.