Dear Rudy,
I’m too tired really to write about it, but I had an outburst today. It was shit. The end.
It’s ridiculous but I feel like you’d be mad if I sent the letter like that, so I’ll tell you a bit more, but only because it’s September and I want you to understand. It’s maybe the one thing I need more than anything this month, because it was this month a year ago that it all happened. I don’t know where to start, so let me try even if I get it wrong a few times.
The Erin that you and Mum and Dad and Ollie and Dee and everyone else interacts with is not the person I am on the inside. It’s like that trick where you pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. Patting my head is being polite and making the right facial expressions and asking the right questions and knowing which things are acceptable and which things are rude to say in a social setting. Patting my head is making sure I seem like a normal person to everyone else. Meanwhile, I’m rubbing my stomach. That’s the inside bit. That’s the bit where I like to find patterns and add numbers and I can sometimes see how things smell and I like to be quiet. It’s how flicking my wrists feels nice when I’m stressed and someone touching my arm without asking feels deeply uncomfortable. All of this, the inside stuff, feels good to me and wrong to everyone else. And it’s the constant need to keep both going at one time that means I’m part distracted most of the time. When I get tired, like I did in class today, it is so much harder to do both things at once. So I stopped doing the head patting. I got up and left without telling the teacher why, and I went to sick bay, and that didn’t make things any better so I kicked the walls a few times and I got to come home. I guess what I’m saying is that the parts of me you saw, the parts where we clashed or couldn’t connect, weren’t the only parts of me. You didn’t see the inside bit. I like to think I didn’t really see yours either. It makes things feel a bit better when I think that.
I saw Dr Lim today and she talked about how September is a hard month. She was better today, and by the time I got to our appointment, so was I. It’s amazing what a few hours of lying in a dark room can do. I know you know that. Mum let me stay in my room until my appointment and I hid under my covers like I used to when I was a kid. When I got to Dr Lim’s, I lay down on her couch, which felt very much like I was in a scene from a movie even though it was a sofa and not a chaise longue. Usually I just sit in the armchair. All the furniture is grey or wooden, and all her books look fake. I say that because they’re all the same height and mostly the same colour, when my bookshelf at home is such a mix of colours, sizes, well-worn paperbacks and special collectors’ hardbacks. I have arranged them in so many ways over the years:
None of those ways worked for me and so now they’re a mess, like nothing else in my life could be or has been before. Dr Lim told me to try not to let my mind wander too much this month and to try to feel everything. I assured her I am. I’m feeling it all. She asked what I was thinking about Schoolies, and how I was feeling. I told her I was excited about it, but I wasn’t really thinking about it much. I’m not imagining myself there like I did with formal, and I’m not counting the hours or days anymore. She asked when I stopped counting and I told her it was when I got my new job. I couldn’t say why. But the big moments just seem to want to let me down. There’s too much pressure, or too many people, or something like that. My shifts at Robins are small and quiet, and I like them best of all.
At home Dad was making rissoles, his barbecue special, with a secret recipe that he knows we all love. He was on the deck watching the birds and grilling away. He looked a bit happy. September is maybe the hardest for him, because he doesn’t let himself feel it. I wonder what the inside of his head sounds like, if he says as much to himself as I do, or if it’s as quiet as he is on the outside.
Watching him out there on the back deck with the birds, I wonder whether I’ve approached things the wrong way with Dad all this time. I’ve been waiting for him to say something, to do something to show he’s accepting of my different brain wiring and my habit of saying the truth and my outbursts and my quietness. Maybe he’s just waiting for me to accept all of that so he can follow my lead.
You and him, well I’d like to know what you have to say about that, because it has always felt like you were hiding yourselves from each other. It was easier for him to be tough on you than to admit he admired you for going a different way, and it was easier for you to be mad at him for that than to admit you were worried about disappointing him. Easier. We do so many things because they’re easier. I’m trying not to be mad at you, but being mad feels easier right now. The hardest month makes us all want to take the easiest path. But if the roles were reversed I know you would do the hard things.
Love, Erin