Dear Diary: Ella’s Blurry Mirror

Dear Diary,
This week has been incredibly busy, so busy that I feel like I can hardly breathe. 
Which seems to be a common occurrence for me at the moment. I don’t really know why, seeing as I love hanging out with my friends, and I’m doing well in school, and my parents are being mostly okay with each other this week. 
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But it sometimes feels like I can’t really see myself in the mirror anymore, if you know what I mean.

It kind of feels like when you’re in the summer holidays, or any holiday for that matter, where you feel stressed all the time because you don’t know what you’re going to do every day, and nobody wants to have a set routine. I can never understand why people look forward to them; they’re so unpredictable!

Like on Wednesday, last week, after I went to Freda’s house to try on the lilac dress she made. We had a wonderful time, her mum made us snacks, and once I’d put her dress on, she posed me outside in the field behind her garden, dabbing make-up and modelling my hair. When we came inside afterwards, I went to get undressed and caught myself in the mirror, with pink, rosy lips and a flush across my cheeks. I squinted my eyes at myself a little longer and tried to imagine my face in the makeup, but I just couldn’t see me anymore, so I rubbed it all off and handed the dress back to Freda with a polite refusal to take it home with me. 

I don’t know what came over me. I guess I just felt uncomfortable.

And I’ve always had these, I call them panic attacks, where everything gets too overwhelming and I can’t hide my emotions any longer, so they all come tumbling out too quickly for me to stop. But recently, I keep having them in school, in front of everyone, and it’s so embarrassing, I don’t know what to do. 

I had one in school the day before I went to Freda’s. I was in my English class and this girl I was sitting next to, Mia, who I was friends with years ago (we fell out – I’m still not really sure why?) was ignoring me again, and suddenly I felt my throat closing up, my eyes watering, and an inexplicable rage passing over me, and I ran out of the classroom before the teacher had even dismissed me. I felt crying, and I was making strange noises, and my hands were scrunching and unscrunching, and I put them over my ears to block the noise. I was in the corridor on the second floor, and then suddenly I was in the canteen and Freda was talking to me. I can’t remember how I got from one place to the other, but I think there was probably a lot of staring.
And it happened again today.

Natalie and I were walking down from English together, and she was talking about how she’s trying to pick a guy to have a crush on. 
“Which guy do you think it should be? Who do you think I have the best chance with?” She asked, looking at the sea of people queuing up for the canteen. 
I didn’t really know, so I just pointed to a guy at random. Natalie pulled a face. 

“Him?” She said, “He is such a freak. No, I need someone who’s going to make Daisy jealous of me. How about George? He’s fine, don’t you think? Ella? El-”
She stopped because I think I stopped walking several strides behind her. I could hear her talking in the background, but my chest was thumping, and my brain was latched onto one singular word: freak.

I could feel my mouth moving to form the word. Freak. Freak. My face was wet, and my hands were clenched by my ears again. I was breathing, but sharp, ragged breaths, and I may as well have been screaming the word because it felt like I was shouting. I felt myself walk into the corner of the canteen and stand there whilst the words fell out of my mouth.
I tuned Natalie in at some point.

“Please, can you just calm down? You’re kind of making a scene. Ella, people are looking at us,” the last bit she said through clenched teeth, and suddenly, I was alone in the corner. 
I wanted to crawl on the floor and hide under a table or shut my eyes so tightly nobody could see me, but I was still there, I was still in the corner. 

And then someone came up to me and touched my shoulder. I shrank away from their touch. It felt like knives on a chalkboard were probing my skin. When I looked around, I saw that it was Emily from my French class, her hair in even curly brown plaits. 

“Ella?” She said, and I could feel her eyes on me. She asked, “Are you okay?”
When I didn’t respond, she guided me towards the stairwell and into the first-floor toilets.
“It’s quiet up here,” she said, and I locked myself in a stall, put my hands over my ears and crouched down next to the toilet bowl, rocking myself slowly on the speckled tiles. 

When I eventually came out, Emily was still standing, leaning against the wall on her phone. I washed my hands, and she walked over to me. She didn’t say anything, but she smiled and waved goodbye because she didn’t want to be late for class (even though we had seven minutes to get there).

Later, when I got home, I was speaking again, and I told my mum what had happened. She stroked my arm sympathetically and said she thought Natalie was being a terrible friend at the moment.

She added, “That Emily girl sounds nice, though, couldn’t you be friends with her instead?” And then she continued to talk about the new group at our church, for teenagers, and how she was going to take me and my sister Tilly along in the week.

You see, diary, I think Emily is nice too. We could be friends. We could become really close friends, maybe. 

Lots of hugs, Ella xxx