STOP

You’re sick so often that by the time you’re 18 and allowed to sign your own sick note, they take that right away from you. You go to the same doctor for four years and he never asks why a young person like you needs a sick note for school at least once a week, often more. The best days are when Mam takes you along on her way to work and you sing along to Cher’s Do you believe together. Her presence gives you comfort and you almost forget where you’re headed until you see the familiar marks and start sliding down in your seat: the noise barrier when you leave the motorway and Hornbach’s orange “ja ja jippie jippie yeah jay” advert before you turn the corner to school. On bad days, you read Paul McKenna’s Change your life in 7 days on the train, and once you’ve set your bag down in the classroom, you go throw up in the bathroom.

When you move to Austria, it’s so you don’t have to see anyone from school at university. But your old life catches up with you. When you go to the doctor in your second semester because you can’t get out of bed and always feel tired, he leaves you with anti-depressants and a question: Maybe you should think about your life and if there are any changes you need to make.

I remember the sense of confusion as you walk down the stairs from his practice. What does he mean by that? Even though you cry on the phone to your Mam that even with a car you don’t know where to go, even though you spend hours on forums talking about your boyfriend and trying to figure out the fine line between chatting and cheating, and even though you didn’t move to another country, but escaped there – you can’t make sense of that question.

It implies that you have choices and you need to start making better ones.

At a time when everything about your life feels inevitable, it’s as if you can understand the words of his question, but you can’t quite process the meaning of them. The world around you feels so overpowering in its authority over you that you don’t even realise that it would be possible to do it all differently. It never occurs to you to stop suffering under the momentum that is moving you along your life. You never consciously arrive at the idea that you could simply … stop. That you could listen to your stomach churning, listen to your tears, listen to your own tiredness.

You circle entire passages in Effi Briest, a book about a depressed woman suffocating in the constraints of her life, and you pencil “this feels like me” into the page margins, but you don’t get the hint. Held in place by expectations, other people’s needs and desires, and the examples they set, you’re always in motion and never consider to stop. To take a breath.

Sometimes you arrive at the acknowledgement that this life you’re living isn’t what you want, but you never think that you could do something about it. My love, think again.