An Outstretched Hand

Some people can't cope with the way the world looks at them and they disappear. An outstretched hand is all that's needed to bring them back.

I'm not a nice person. In fact, a lot of people consider me a monster.

I can't disagree.

But, I do like to help as many people as I can, even if it doesn't change the fact that I'm a perceived monster.

Dark, malicious and Machiavellian. But I only show people to themselves and they never like what they see.

Not this time, this time is different.

This story isn't about me, as much as it seems so at the moment.

This is about a very special girl. Lonely, afraid and isolated.

Well, not any more I hope.

I have to play "therapist" whenever anyone has the tiniest of problems and they think the world is against them. And I do the same thing in deadpan routine. Tell them they're in the right and things will get better. It's all just routine. Most of the time, I couldn't give two s***s about their problems, I'd prefer to make them see how stupid they're acting. One particular time, a stupid girl was threatening suicide and claiming she was isolated from the outside world, because Daddy took away her iPhone while she was using it as he gave her an earful for staying out late. Stupid girl. We don't talk any more after I showed her herself. We seem to live in an age where it's a cool thing to have deep-rooted issues that lead to dissociation and depression. It's not cool, it's smothering and it burns you from the inside.

One day, I was talking to a girl I hadn't talked to for months before and things took a turn for the psychological as it seems to whenever I talk to anyone. She said she had low self-esteem issues and zero confidence. Here we go again. But something was different, we connected. Not only did I see the lonely, scared and isolated girl in that text, but I saw myself. Before I climbed out of the dark hole of depression and self-hatred.

The thing about confidence is that it's all psychosomatic, act confident and eventually it'll come. That's all there is to it. Obviously at the beginning, that false confidence will be destroyed too many times to count, but it's just a matter of picking yourself up and dusting yourself off. It will come, you just need to work at it. There's no point in giving up when life gets a little tough, giving up is a weakness and that weakness needs to be turned around. No-one is naturally weak. No-one.

She asked if I was depressed, I knew instantly that she was. It wasn't a question used to get to know me, but one used so I can know more about her. She was already displaying confidence in someone and in herself for revealing a part of her. I used to be depressed, but something happened that lifted me out of it. I stopped caring. I stopped caring about how people looked at me like a monster, or worse. I stopped caring about how people treated me like glass, fearing that I'll shatter and they'll cut themselves on the shards left behind. I stopped caring about their judgement and started caring about myself. This hole isn't healthy and I need to get out of it right now. I told her a period of self-discovery and self-therapy followed, all from a range of questions I asked myself.

"Why was I depressed?"

"Why should I be?"

"How can I fix it and what should I change?"

She had those moments as well, but she let them pass by, unnoticed, too busy hating herself. Not healthy. The answers to the question will come easily, they're right there in your head, in your throat ready to rise up and form words to be uttered and understood. But it's up to you whether you'll listen or stay down that hole. She didn't believe she had any of those moments, but she had. I know she had, it's impossible not to question why you're lonely and isolated, why you spend the days in solitude with nothing but your self-hatred and violent thoughts for company. No-one deserves that, so they question why they're there.

And that's when it started for her, the moment of self-discovery, of self-therapy and I'll be damned if I was going to let it slip by her. I turned her head towards it, the answers that were buried in her head for so long, the light shining down into the hole. I ask the questions whose answers are within her and she answers them easily. She has nothing to prove to anyone, so why should she be disappointed in herself when her true colours disappoint others?

An outstretched hand comes from the top of the hole to lift her out, and she grabs it. She climbs. Oh, how she climbs a frantic, ecstatic climb. Only to realise that the outstretched hand that pulled her out of that dark hole wasn't mine.

It was her own.

Reviews

[Zone]

"...the outstretched hand that pulled her out of that dark hole wasn't mine.
It was her own."
F*****g portals man...