"At first sight, therefore, she wasn't so different from any other sixteen years old girl. She only had one defect, which might seem trifle, but it was so grave that it influenced many aspects of her life. After some Google research, one day, she'd...
You can find the original Italian version here: https://www.wattpad.com/story/67682623-dopotutto-sei-solo-una-ragazza-un-po%27-troppo
This story was written for a contest in which we had to choose a picture from a selection and write a short story inspired by it. I chose this one:
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Sabrina wasn't an unpleasant girl, on the contrary: being more than 5"5, with a long and delicate neck caressed by thin blondish locks, a visage with gentle traits and big clear eyes, she wasn't to dismiss at all. Sure, she wasn't a catwalk beauty, but still she had nothing to envy to her classmates. She was quite intelligent too, she did rather well in almost any class, and she was even the best chemistry student of her class. She was a bit awkward though, and she didn't excel in sports and P.E., but neither did many classmates of hers, after all. She had two parents, a little brother, and a medium-sized white dog. She enjoyed pop music, had two best friends, a Facebook profile, a semi-wrecked school diary, and unbearable period cramps.
At first sight, therefore, she wasn't so different from any other sixteen years old girl. She only had one defect, which might seem trifle, but it was so grave that it influenced many aspects of her life. After some Google research, one day, she'd found out that her problem had a name, too: social anxiety disorder, or social phobia. Sabrina was smart enough to know that self-diagnosing on the internet was stupid, even dangerous sometimes, but she was convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that was her problem.
If not, what could explain the unsettling feeling of panic she felt any time the attention of the room was all focused on her? Even in the waiting, in the anticipation of all those eyes fixed on her, or in the illusory, paranoid sensation that somebody was observing her, she felt panic rising up inside.
The path that this panic walked through her body was always the same: it all started in her heart, whose beats would speed up and pump more blood in her head, which soon started to ache, and sometimes embarrassingly dye her face in red. Soon after, it was the lungs' turn, which started to stock up air in an uncoordinated rhythm, more and more inefficient, until she started to hyperventilate. All this was often accompanied by an annoying tremor in her hands, weakness in the muscles of her legs, and, unfortunately, nervous vomiting.
Nausea, at this point, had become like a travelling companion, or rather, an unwanted invader who'd made breach in her fortress, devastating it. From several months now, every morning, she would find herself on her knees, in front of the toilet seat. It was almost a habit now, she'd even stopped crying on it, thinking of the day when her teeth would become greenish and thin like the teeth of those who've been bulimic for many years.
The mere thought of all the students on the bus, with all their gazes, was enough to turn her stomach upside down. Sabrina had tried to convince her mother to keep driving her to school, but in September she'd made the definite and unmovable decision that Sabrina had to start taking the bus and become more responsible and independent. «You're sixteen» she'd said, «it's time that you start doing things by yourself and become more autonomous.»
The bus drive took more or less fifteen minutes, but Sabrina experienced them as fifteen hours: all those guys and girls chatting with each other, ogling, gossiping, but more importantly laughing. Every time she heard someone giggling, Sabrina couldn't help thinking that they were laughing about her. Laughing of her unruly heir, of a toothpaste stain on her chin, of the open zipper on her jeans, of a hole on her shirt, just above her breast, of the half-open rucksack, of a sanitary pad pocking out of the back pocket ...
At every laugh that reached her ears, she did a complete check-up to make sure nothing was out of place. Apart from the zipper slightly pulled down one afternoon, she'd never found anything. Absolutely nothing. But this wasn't reassuring enough, she always thought: «Maybe next time there will actually be something embarrassing!». She'd even quit listening to music in public for fear that the audio, for some reason, would suddenly get played on her mobile's speaker, and not just on her ear-plugs. Then everyone would ridicule her for her tasteless choice in music.
On her first school day, she'd done anything in her power to plant her flag on one of the desks on the bottom of the classroom, the one on the left, where nobody could look at her without her noticing. And yet, when she was forced to get on her feet, in front of the teacher's desk or at the blackboard for oral exams, she seemed to have no problems. Even though she spoke with a faint voice, Sabrina had always managed to express herself without feeling too pressured. Unless she couldn't answer a question.
In which case, there was the insidious old panic, slithering back inside her, clamping her heart, blocking her airways, and stealing her voice, until someone started to giggle. Then, most times, she asked for permission to get out of the classroom, so she could rush to the bathroom. Or, if she knew the teacher was one of those who wouldn't allow students to leave the classroom until the end of the hour, she just left without asking to hide herself in the bathroom, sometimes just to cry, but usually to puke.
To Sabrina, unfortunately, there was nothing more devastating than doing something ridiculous, wrong, embarrassing, or stupid, and feeling judged by others, by anyone, even a perfect stranger, as weird, ugly, stupid, inappropriate, inadequate, lame, or even disgusting. And even though logic and common sense suggested that she wasn't all those things at all (and even if she'd been, that judgment wouldn't have weighted on her life in any way), her phobia was too strong. Sabrina was also aware of the irrationality and exaggeration of her thoughts and behaviour, but awareness didn't seem to be a good enough weapon to fight them.
Therefore, deeply terrorised by other people's judgment, and because of this incapable of asking for help, Sabrina had ended up surrendering to her weakness, letting her condition get so bad that, on a school trip, she even attacked a particularly mean classmate of hers. Sabrina remembered how, in one of her biology classes, the teacher had explained that, in a highly stressful situation, the ancestral self-preserving instinct elicits a physiological response of the organism to prepare the body to fight or fly. Until that school trip, her panicked body had always gone for the second option. On that day, instead, a black veil had clouded her eyesight and then, without even realising it, she'd practically turned into a beast.
The cause? A stupid joke on a single hair, longer than normal, that had grown on her face and that somehow she hadn't noticed when she'd washed her face and looked at her reflection in the mirror, the evening prior.
As you might have deduced, or read on my profile, Italian is my first language. Therefore, any correction, suggestion, or whatever is deeply appreciated :). Thank you for any possible feedback!
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