Liar//MYG✔️

Chapter 9//It's Too Much

Jinae carried on as if nothing had happened between her and Yoongi, as if they hurt didn't matter. She still taught her piano and voice lessons. She still attended nearly every social event that she was sent an invitation to. She made her customary visits to the coffee shop, and as Jin Myung was busy with her work and personal life, there wasn't anyone in her daily life who could spot what was truly going on in her head and in her heart.

   No one she was close to knew that she had fought with Yoongi, and no one around her could see any trace of sadness.

   Weeks passed this way. Those weeks turned into months.

   She smiled and laughed just as she had before.

   Her work and social life kept spinning without faltering.

   Jinae made everything look as normal and peaceful as she possibly could.
 

  She had always been good at hiding her pain and true feelings, and that was exactly what she was doing now.

   Beneath her smiles, she was numb and lonely.

   Yoongi truly was one of the only friends she had that she kept in regular contact with. Throughout her life, he had been there. She had experienced most of her childhood and teenage years with him. He knew her better than anyone else did. She didn't have a sister who could drag her out of bed or a brother to call her on her lies with skepticism. She hadn't been close to her parents after they'd separated, they'd not given her much of a chance. Without Yoongi, she was alone. 

    Surrounded by the wealthy and accomplished crowd, who she was acquainted with but not close to, Jinae was safe in her pain.

   
   She could sip champagne and laugh at corny, nonsensical jokes at some socialite party and not have to worry about prying questions.

   None of those acquaintances would ask why she wasn't eating well and was losing weight.
   They wouldn't fret over her long work hours and the darkening circles under her eyes.
   They didn't know that she was supposed to visit her therapist biweekly, and they couldn't hear the messages left on her machine asking why she hadn't shown for her appointments the past three weeks.
They were all fooled by her kind disposition and habit of easy laughter and smiling. She was quiet, but not unpleasant. This helped Jinae fool them into thinking she was perfectly happy, even when she wasn't.

   Jinae held everyone at a comfortable distance so that she wouldn't get hurt.

   She remembered the pain she had felt when her father left. She remembered all the times Yoongi had let her down. She remembered when her mother had become too busy and absorbed with her husband to care for her daughter's problems.

   At one time or another, she had let all of these people get close to her. She had let them see all of her good and bad sides alike, all of her hopes and fears.
 
   Every time, Jinae had been hurt.

   She was tired of being hurt by people.

   Inwardly, she resolved to stop letting people get close to her. After all, she reasoned, that was when you gave them power over you. If they knew the real you, they could hurt you.

   Her therapist had lectured her on the dangers of her thought processes over and over again, so she stopped going. Jinae didn't want to be told over and over that she was abnormal and unhealthy.

   Now that Yoongi was gone, she didn't mind her own mind.

   After all, fighting her thoughts hadn't gotten her anywhere better thus far.

   What did it matter that she thought relationships pointless and only good for hurt? She didn't keep herself from questioning the value of every human construct an ideal anymore. They were constant now, her spirals. Her therapist had called it "catastrophic thinking." Before they had been occasional and she'd fought against them with the tools of logic and emotion that her therapist had advised her to use. Now though, she let the thoughts rule her mind.

   Most people will let their self-doubt create moments of intense fear for the future at one time or another. It can begin with the fear that one will fail a test, then they jump to the conclusions that they will fail their class, flunk, and become homeless. Most people don't experience these moments often, only in extreme times of stress. Their spirals eventually end. Jinae's spirals, however, wouldn't stop.

   That was the way it had been for her since she was a child. One small thought of failure descended into a crisis. Before she had even become a teenager she questioned why people lived and loved and worked so hard to only die later on. Her natural mindset was that it was all futile. This was where her spirals led, to the conclusion that nothing mattered. Her parent's messy separation took out the sparkle and beauty in life and they'd given Jinae her deepest fears.

******

   Jinae had watched as her father had come home with lipstick on his collar, and she had listened from her bedroom as her mother screamed obscenities at him. She'd found out that day that her father had slipped up. But not in the sense that he had cheated on her mother, he'd slipped up by not cleaning up the evidence. He'd hidden it for three years and that night wasn't supposed to be any different. She'd watched with silent tears as her father had left the house quietly and in the dark with a small duffel bag. She had tried without success to comfort her sobbing mother.
 
   The nightmare hadn't ended that night though. Every time her father came home, her parents fought. Her mother would yell and call her father names, hitting on his unfaithfulness and her belief that he was a lowly dog at least five times in each conversation. Her father didn't try to defend himself, instead, he would just gather some of his possessions and leave.
   Occasionally, her father would take her for dinner or watch a movie in the theater, not her theater, of course, it was the theater in his new neighborhood. Jinae only asked her father about his affair one time, but he had scolded her so severely that she never addressed it again.  He'd told her that his and her mother's affairs were not her business and she had better not discuss it with any of her neighbors.
    So Jinae kept her mouth shut as her father slowly moved out of their home and as her mother destroyed all other traces of him. After all, that's what they wanted of her. Silence.

   She stayed silent as they fought over custody and as neighbor women came over to discuss her "lowlife" of a father with her mother.
 
   The only one she had ever told her true feelings to when it came to her father's affair and her parent's following divorce was Yoongi.

   Now though, even that relationship had ended.

   Her belief that it was better to keep to herself when it came to her feelings and struggles was only reinforced. There was simply no one to push the point of openness anymore.

   It seemed that Jinae's worst fears were true. Love was not long-lasting and deep. It had limits and it wasn't as pure of value as she had believed it to be when she was six years old.
   Love, after all, Jinae had decided, wasn't real.

A/N:  I wanted to clarify really quickly that catastrophic thinking is an actual thing. It is most often when a person begins off with a thought of a small failure, like getting a C on a test, and then they jump to a conclusion that the failure will be life-altering. It's an irrational train of thought, and it's pretty common.
However, you shouldn't have these thoughts all of the time and they most certainly should not descend into an existential crisis every time. Having experienced these, I wanted to show the experience in this story in order to demonstrate the necessity of sharing one's thoughts in order to get realistic and encouraging feedback. 

This is interesting to me, not just because I often experience these phenomena, but also because I plan to study Psych in uni this fall. Anyways, that's a tangent, but oh well. 

Anyways, please eat well and take care of yourselves.

Featured Song:  It's Too Much by Mooseblood

(Edited June 2019)

*Novi*