These are the transformative years – or so they say. I’m spending mine in Medlhurst Manor Mental Health Care Centre for young adults. That wasn’t what I had planned. When my mother and father found out that I had mental health issues they panicked; and practically disowned me. I’m not resentful.

If you can picture a place where the trees are evergreen and the white walls are high and the moods are as high as the walls and sometimes as low as the underworld then you have the breadth of understanding you need for a place like Medlhurst. You’d never desire to come here.

Growing up, I always told myself I wanted to become a “nobody” because it was easier than becoming “somebody.” This isn’t a confessional. If I could remove all the expectations surrounding me, including those I may have had for myself then I was free to do and live as I pleased. Free from judgment. Or so I thought.

I had been feeling that way right up until last week. It was surprisingly liberating to be without your family for so long and make your own rules (obviously abiding by those set out by the “health care professionals” but just being able to be was freedom.)

All of that changed last week. When He arrived – and no I don’t mean God. For me to find religion it would take a miracle – pardon the pun. Instead, I find through writing that you can cleanse yourself of certain demons. And it proves God quite useless. Well, not all of them. Especially when you have as many as I do; but I’m doing my best with what very little power I have left. Anyway, this He, well you wouldn’t quite credit how stereotypical I am.

He was a male who managed to captivate me in the way no other male had managed up until this point in my life. I was seventeen; it’s a liminal old age when you think about being on the cusp of adulthood. The prospect never bothered me. He bothered me though. Something about him that I couldn’t place. Maybe I should tell you there’s magic involved in an attempt to make this sound more interesting. I promise you: He didn’t sparkle. Although, He did have a scar on his forehead, but it wasn’t lightning shaped. Believe me, I checked.

There were other things about his face, his body, his personality that I had happened to notice; and not necessarily in that order. The dimples, the details and all of which drove me crazy because as of yet I hadn’t touched them. Alright that implies that I wanted to touch them, but at that moment in time I didn’t have the capacity to. If there was a God he would have sent me to the Devil ages based purely on the amount of impure thoughts that ran through my head.

You wouldn’t understand.

He was my nemesis for a while, or so I decided. With his brown hair and his blue eyes and his dark smile. Sounds like something out a book doesn’t it? (One of the fictional kind.) It may surprise you to know that I only write about the truth as it goes around me. This isn’t a confessional.

Of course, it’s susceptible to scepticism how much you could really trust what I’m saying, after all I am the one with the “mental condition” and that affects my condition. Which, I have sensibly decided not to reveal too much away about because, then, well… you won’t think I’m a nice or reliable or whatever it is you’re supposed to think about me. Which to be perfectly honest, I don’t give a fuck about anyway.

No one can steal these words from me, because it is my story. And even after all the bad things that may have happened to me, and all the bad choices I have made, words are the free avengers of the condemned. Fortunately, I am at liberty to use as many words as I like to explain the horrors I found of just being myself.