A Broken Heart Can Be Mend In Many Ways

Confidence

          I think that it all started when I was 12 and my parents announced me that they were going to divorce. As an only child and the youngest kid in my family, I found no real refuge to talk about it. I, thus, started writing. Poems, songs, insignificant texts but they helped me release a bit of the pain I was in. Two years later, my music teacher saw me sitting in one of the hallways, all by myself as usual (I've always been kind of a loner I guess), and suggested to help me put a melody on my texts. Confused at first, I thought he just wanted to know what the problem was with me. Indeed, unlike the other kids my age, I always was alone, very quiet, I had maximum three persons in the school I would agree to talk to (and two of them were professors) and I never ate anything at the cafeteria besides the fruits. People always saw in me a weird kid with a psychotic behavior and I can't tell them wrong.

However, this music teacher decided otherwise. He saw in me, in my words more particularly, unexploited potential and something more. I never really quite got what was so special about me, why he insisted so much on having me to trust him but his perseverance got the best of me and I finally agreed to let him in in my world. During the rest of that year, I spent every second of free time I had in his classroom, composing with him my first songs. I was 14 so the texts were not so good but he helped me improving them. The problem was the singing. I was –and still am- always out of tune. I am unable to sing a straight note that will sound right and, for a girl whose dream was to perform on Broadway, this was a major inconvenient. He was nonetheless relentless in his efforts to help me and encouraged me into taking music class outside the school, in our hometown music conservatory. After a one-hour meeting between my parents and him and I ended up in this music conservatory, taking flute, music theory and singing lessons.

The end of the year approached and I knew I was going to be in great difficulty. My grades were far from being great and, since the exam we had to take at the end of secondary school is half based on them, I was pretty sure I wouldn't pass. But I strangely managed to. The exam in my pocket, I was beginning to pick my high school for the following year. One day, one of my teachers got to me and told me very nicely and calmly that I would never be able to do anything useful with my life, that I wasn't good enough to make it through high school. If at first I was very much hurt and offended, I came to the realization that she hadn't done it to pain me but to motivate me. And still today, this moment of my life, how ordinary was it, motivates me more than any speech because I want to prove the b**** wrong. The simple idea of her being right gives me enough strength to fight for what I want. This is of course not the solely reason that pushes me to obtain what I desire but it was the start of my rebellious teen act, if we could say it really was that.

Home was in a rather complicated situation at that time. Over the years, it had become unusually silent. And this silent had begun when I was 12. Indeed, without my parents talking to each other and me never talking to anyone really, we could have heard a cow fart. I know I previously said that my parents considered divorcing when I was 12 but, because of money, they remained together until I reached 17. I generally was alone in room surrounded by books, headphones on and music very loud. I didn't like being all alone but I could bare the company of idiotic beings. The only company I would have loved to have was a cat because, as you might be aware of, they are known for comforting humans. Sadly, I never got that chance. I was thus left alone in my silent room, in a silent house, in a desert town. I couldn't wait to go to high school. I knew that I would have to go afar from my home town, people would be, as I thought back then, more mature and I would have the opportunity to take drama classes.

But when you are 14, you dream a lot... and things usually don't turn out the way you wished they would.

~ Eli G.