Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Alice Jenkins

"I'm just...plain, and I'm boring and...I feel like I'm nothing. Like no-one would even notice if I was gone."

Christ almighty, Alice thought to herself. She wasn't sure how many more monotonous monologues she could sit through. As part of the group therapy for that evening, every woman had been asked to write a small piece of prose on their feelings, and then if there were no objections, they were to each read them out one by one. It was the first time in Alice's life that she had purposely left an assigned task unfinished, attempting one perfunctory line and then staring out the window, stultified, for the rest of the workshop. She wasn't the only one; the haggard, ebony-skinned woman sat on the other side of the circle hadn't written a thing on her paper and appeared equally bored by the proceedings that followed. She audibly sighed at the sight of Colleen, the therapist, opening her mouth to respond to the last girl's statement and watched her talk with a look of apathy so pronounced that it was quite amusing to observe.

"You aren't boring, Claire." Colleen replied soothingly, the woman rolling her eyes and then hanging her head down at this, as if suddenly overcome by lassitude. "Remember what I'm always saying? You're human. All these things that you're all frequently telling me you feel about yourselves, that you're boring, that you're not worthy of love, or of anyone being interested in you? They're impossible. Bear with me ladies because I know some of you will have heard this from me before but just imagine, hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions in your brain every second, to generate tens of thousands of thoughts every day, each one of them moving at upwards of 200mph, each one contributing to an unspoken opinion, an inflection of the voice, a rush of pain or pleasure. And you can believe you're boring? Don't let people tell you that simply because they lack the initiative to really look past your outer casing. There is always, always more to a person than the words that leave their mouths."

"Wow, Colleen. Poetic." The haggard, young woman said, sniggering and lounging back in her chair, every other woman there glaring at her. "What? Did I do something wrong?"

"Nothing, Isla. Thanks for your input." Colleen murmured, unable to fully conceal the acrid edge to her voice. "Who's next?" She persisted despite her evident irritation, smiling as if pained and gesturing towards the woman sat next to Alice. "Abbey. Do you want to read?"

"Yeah." The woman, Abbey, answered quietly, sheepishly clearing her throat before speaking. "I think the scariest moment in life..." She said, trying (and failing) to emanate the nonchalance of the bored woman, Isla; any chance that Alice would've bought the guise was extirpated by the full page's worth of writing, scribed in neat block capitals that Abbey held in front of her. "The scariest moment in life is...when you realise that all you are and all you will ever be is a construction. Your favourite parts of the people that left you behind that you held onto for so long they became part of you." Glancing up for the approval of the rest of the women in the circle, Abbey's hands quivered as she continued. "So every now and then they don't feel quite right. Something you do, something you say, it feels alien, like it doesn't want to be coming out of your mouth, like it doesn't want to be there, like a constant reminder of the fact that eventually you lose everything, even yourself, because nothing was ever really yours in the first place.  And if I try and just be myself? I find that I talk and talk and talk until I have no choice but to face the silence. I get scared. I get scared the silence will swallow me whole and everybody will forget I ever existed. And then I lose them. Everything is temporary and people say that like its a good thing, but it really terrifies me. The future terrifies me. People say that we're only scared of the future for the same reason little kids are scared of the dark. We don't know what it holds. And I suppose, in a way, that's it. But that's not all of it. It's the inability to do anything to control what it contains. We think we're building on something, but there's really nothing there. It doesn't matter what you do."