Love Me: The Manoir

The Peacemaker

My mum used to always tell me I was the 'peacemaker' of the group, and at six years old I felt the same weight and pressure as the leader of the UN. There were atrocities equivalent to civil wars occurring everyday on the playground, and it was my job to run in with an army of storm troopers (this being myself alone) in order to hopefully quell the flames and ruins for at least another day.

And I loved it.

I was everyone's favourite correspondent. I knew every detail, every inner-workings of the next big friendship fallout, every deal on the other side's manifesto about why they refused to play with each other at lunchtime. I would quite literally run back and forth between arguing girls, wipe tears from people's faces, and hopefully settle an armistice by the end of lunch. For the majority of my primary school years, this was designated role.

At six years old the weight of this doesn't really burden anyone, it was more like a game to me. These emotions people felt weren't real, instead they were something for me to fix and manipulate. I saw myself as a third party observer even when right on the battlefield. In years to come, I would pinpoint this as the start of my interior monologue. I was my own confidant because I trusted no one else fully, these people with these petty emotions.

I was also the freak that somehow managed to have friends. There was a burning desire for people to look at me - but not for too long. I would make odd noises, do silly things, say the kind of lines which usually get people bullied, and yet people loved me for some reason. I was never without friends. For a while I thought this was because I had a lovable personality. Now I realise that it's partially because of what I can offer to a friendship.

Things I can bring to any friendship:

•The appearance of her undivided attention - she will remember anything you tell her, even the small mundane features of your day. This is not because she particularly cares, but because she has a surprisingly large memory.

•An abundance of energy - she is silent and sad most of her time alone, desperately seeking something to do.

•Someone who will listen for hours and hours - she is not really listening, more often than not she does not care about your problems, and instead is comparing them to the deep hole inside of herself.

•Someone to make you feel better about yourself when you compare yourself to the mediocre looks, life, and interests of her.

I was so wrapped up in this game as a child that I never stopped to question how levelly-weighted my friendships were. It is now too far in the future to know. However, friendships as children were never too complicated. The didn't require the nuance of facade that would be needed later to continue to fill the needs of my own ego. To be surrounded by people at all times.

***

It was as a child that I also encountered what I can pinpoint as being the first time I ever began to realise that people didn't see me in the ways that they viewed other girls. By people, I mean the boys who would run around the playground knocking each other over or who would break their legs playing Bulldog on ice. As Peacemaker, I had been assigned a role I didn't really agree to. That of the Friend of the Girls People Found Attractive.

Soon, the friends around me seemed to have boys interested in getting to know them away from the Harry Potter re-enactments we would do with sticks as wands. They had watched enough films and TV shows to know that relationships were a thing, and that at ten years old having a girl to hold their sweaty palm was the next step to growing up.

And yet there was me. A greasy-haired, rather tall (I never grew after eleven) girl who was seen as sexless. Not worth desiring in that way because she was assigned asexual before she could even have a say. I marketed myself as a tomboy, that I didn't care that the only boy who had asked to date me was only doing it because four other girls before had already said no. I didn't need a boyfriend anyway, the boys were my friends.

I would go on telling myself that as I typed my name into those cliché, cheesy love calculators online with the boy I fancied that week and felt the crushing feeling in my chest as it came up at 46%. It would be the same crushing feeling I would get throughout my teenage years at the prospect of being undesirable to what felt like the entire planet.

I left primary school a first kiss virgin, happy to be surrounded by friends who I swore I would keep in contact with after moving to 'big school' (I didn't), and crying at the thought of leaving this period of my life behind.

Okay, maybe it is a small lie to say that I left primary school being a first kiss virgin. It wouldn't be till I was older that I began to see how twisted some of the things I did as a kid was. I had one friend – a special friend – who I would repeatedly kiss and enact sexual things with when we were young. We couldn't have been older than 8 or 9, and neither of us had any kind of concept of what we were doing really.

This would be a secret that I would keep for my entire life, completely ashamed and disgusted with myself. It wasn't because I was doing these things with a girl, but because we were doing them so casually at such a young age. I think deep down we both knew it was something incredibly wrong, but we continued to play these fantasy games. I attribute this entirely to peaking my libido at such a young age, leading to the next decade of confusion surrounding the subject of sex. I was introduced to it far too early, and this would be something that I would never quite shake.