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A Life Unlived

When a short story becomes a novella

By JoJoBonettoPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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A Life Unlived
Photo by Sofia on Unsplash

Achievement is subjective. Many people are satisfied with less, they just think they need more.

Although expectations of me have always been depressingly minimal, people have always felt they had a stake in my life, I suppose. 

Everyone considers themselves an expert on how I should and should not conduct myself. I don't remember ever questioning what qualifies them to pass judgement on my life choices. When you are growing up, you are told that someday you will marry, have a house, children. All that normal stuff. I never really had that, or never really felt that. It wasn't that I never wanted it, I just never truly believed I could have it. 

I adjusted my expectations of life from a very young age, facing death does that. 

My teacher told my parents that I was dying in front of me when I was 5-years old. Until that point, I thought I was like every other child at school. Children do not know instinctively they might die, because they have not yet begun to live. I was often in and out of the hospital, coping with illness. Doctors would throw me irritated looks as they made me step on the scales. They discussed my weight, my eating, and how I would need to gain a few more pounds if I were ever to start my periods. My cheeks would burn with shame and humiliation, it felt intrusive and I didn't understand why it was happening to me. All I knew was they blamed me.

They talked about me as if I wasn't there.

As I turned eleven, the doctor at the hospital told me I would live, after all.

There were a lot of people in that room, most of them student doctors. The style of delivery was self-congratulatory and somehow crass. I did not know how I was supposed to react. I blinked. My parents seemed equally perplexed. There was no explanation as to what my mysterious medical condition had been. No one claimed to have cured anything. Possibly because no one had claimed to have found anything wrong with me. I was going to live, and that was that. I was angry and resentful. My childhood had been stolen from me and as I grew older, I felt like a thief, trying to steal whatever remnants of my life back that I could.

I used to want my life to imitate art. I had dreams of doing fanciful things, having exotic adventures, living a life full of vibrant colour. I was a young child when I learned that your life can turn to shades of grey in an instant and suddenly all of those youthful hopes and dreams can be snuffed out. Like a candle. 

There is not an awful lot you can do when faced with the prospect of survival after so many years of 70s and 80s British medical quackery. I never really had ambition, or not consistently anyway. I did achieve some things, but my lack of both primary and secondary education made some of that difficult. I was thirty years old when I received a diagnosis of dyslexia. 

I had received a clear and unambiguous message from my teachers at primary school that there was no point in educating me as I was only going to die anyway. 

I still remember the same teacher who hysterically sentenced me to death when I was aged five, snatching a story I was writing, slowly, from me before I could finish it. I still see the last word I wrote on that page. It was "be". Ironically, nobody ever gave me a chance to just "be". I was never able to be a mother. I was led to believe that should I become pregnant my kidneys may fail. A myth perpetuated by both the medical profession and my family, to a certain extent. The fact my family validated that belief was not their fault. They were given misinformation. At almost 45 it is now too late to have that family of my own. My kidney tests continue to be excellent. My kidneys are not even monitored as the beauty of the NHS is that nobody ever reads your medical notes. There is zero continuity of care and to ask for it would take longer than the standard consultation time allows. I have made my peace with that but it did make me angry for a time. There are people much worse off than I am.

The thing with having dreams is this. Even when people do their best to snuff them out, they can reignite. Over the decades many a dream was extinguished but I still endured. I survived. I had relationships, friendships, and worked. I got a University education, although not a stellar one due to my undiagnosed dyslexia and lack of education in my formative years.

Do I have a tendency to drift? Yes. am I impulsive? Often. I find my own way to where I need to be, at the time that makes the most sense for me. That is the only way I know how to "be".

Childhood
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About the Creator

JoJoBonetto

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