Blurb - Texture
A four part memoir blast about the years when I was too young to carry what I carried, and too old to be protected from any of it. These are the shards: the overwhelm, the rescue missions, the masks, and the borrowed families that held me together when I didn’t know how to hold myself.
“For the children I tended when I couldn’t tend myself.”
The Teenager Who Grew Up Too Fast
As a teenager I was overwhelmed most of the time. Too much going on at home, too much responsibility, too many thoughts I couldn’t switch off. I was basically in charge of my brothers—only eleven months between us, but somehow that made me the caregiver—so school never felt like school. It felt like a place I passed through. I didn’t have much in common with anyone. Everyone felt immature to me because I was already living an adult life.
I did make a couple of friends, but they left quickly, one after the other. By the time the third Emma came along, I decided to hold onto her because I realised it was “normal” to have a friend your own age. I always preferred older people anyway—people who matched the weight I was carrying.
With Emma, I put on my first proper mask. There was nothing she liked that I liked, but I tried, because that’s what I thought you were meant to do. It wasn’t really her I connected with; it was her family. They took me to dinner, they did things I’d never had before, and I was grateful in a way that felt huge. In their house I was the good one—the Kevin and Perry thing: difficult for your own parents, good for someone else’s.
We weren’t friends because of shared interests. We were friends because society said this is what girls your age do, and we were lucky enough to be each other’s mutuals.
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