Something Amazing

I want to feel normal.  Well, doesn't everyone?

But maybe what I am afraid of, is that fact that I am distinctly normal.  Not really special in anyway.

I creep between the pages of other people's online lives wishing for little pieces of their existence.  I am not stupid.  I know that the internet serves as a well-oiled PR machine for other folk's reality which is just as grey as mine.  But it doesn't stop me wanting it all the same.

I am sick of the ordinary.  I want fireworks, rockets, spaceships, another world! I want to be something amazing.  I want to be something I am not.

Rosie McAndrew was never amazing at anything.  Really good at lots of stuff.  But amazing? Never.

I remember a dream I used to have as a child.  I would be on the ropes in gym class, swinging off them like an acrobat.  Flipping and turning and somersaulting.  And my friends would gasp and marvel at my physical feats.  I can feel the exhilaration from that dream as I revisit it now.  The feeling of almost being superhuman.

It was a recurring dream.  But I never did anything about it.  I never practised any harder.  I never nagged my mum to take me to a gym club so I could get good.  I just lived the feeling through the dream.  I think that is what I have been doing for most of my life.  Living vicariously through dreams; thinking things as if that was equivalent to doing them.  Stagnating on the sofa in front of the telly, believing that I was the female lead in my own private movie.

When I was a teenager, I wrote in my diary that I wanted to save the world.  Be the prime minister or be like Diana, daring to step through the mines.  I wanted to end poverty.  I wanted to be a millionaire.  I got into music and wanted to work in the music industry (I had actually recognised by this point that I couldn't sing and that debilitating stage fright put paid to any hope of being a professional pianist).

Then I got interested in boys.  I was too socially awkward to be a girl that a boy would be interested in.  Too intense.  Yes, far too intense.  I daydreamed about falling in love and had obsession after obsession with this boy and that boy.  No teenage boy was ever going to be interested in someone who was so needy and possessive.  And I really hadn't thought about whether I liked a boy because of who they were.  That didn't matter. If I fancied them, I just created a personality for them in my head that I could fall in love with.  Because speaking to a boy and actually getting to know them was never  going to happen.

I aspired to be part of the in-crowd without realising that it mattered more whether I genuinely connected with these people.  I wanted to be popular without really thinking about whether it mattered if you were popular or not.  I didn't realise what a square peg I was and that all the holes around me were round.

I experimented with being bad.  Breaking the rules.  I got away with it largely because everyone thought I was a geek.

I got rejected by my so called friends.  When I look back now, I am not surprised.  I don't think I would have wanted to be friends with me either.  I wasn't considering who they were, I just wanted social status.  But being teenagers, that is what they wanted too.  And I was just too weird for them.  So I got rejected.  And it hurt.  And I have found it so hard to trust anyone since.  I have found it easier to need no-one.

I don't want to be that person anymore.  I want something real.