It has been three years since I escaped the camps and went on the run. I was only eighteen when I managed to get away from them. It has been three years since I began my search for a life of my own, for freedom and meaning and independance.
In a way, I found those things during the two years following my flight. It was fraught with fear, hunger, self-loathing, but looking back on it now, I can also see how strong it made me. I fended for myself, scraping a living from what I could find, eating what I could forrage, clothing myself in what I could scavenge. It was a miserable existance, yet I do not regret it.
It has been only one year since I entered the world properly. One year since I learned what it is to live for myself. One year is not enough.
Most people are born into this world, nurtured and loved by those around them, brought up to know and understand the society around them. They are taught how to function, how to act correctly, how to conduct their day to day affairs and to look after themselves. They are, in short, prepared for their ascension to adulthood that they might live good and healthy lives when the time comes for them to leave their homes and stand alone.
I was not.
I was not taught any of these things and thus when eventually I made my way out into the bright light of day, it blinded me. Even now, I find it difficult to see for, try as I might, I can never quite understand what it is that I am looking at.
It all seems so messy and chaotic.
Social values are one thing that strike me as particularly strange. I hear of them, I read of them. I am told that it is incorrect or unseemly for a young woman to abide in the same house as her betrothed before they wed, and yet it is acceptable for her to dwell with an unmarried man whether or not she is set to marry another. Where is the sense in that? What is the difference between the two scenarios and why does it matter?
Likewise, I am led to believe that I should choose my friends wisely and that I should not base my decision upon who they are or what they are really like, but on what other people may think of me for knowing such a person. What, then, if all these other people who decide my image are wrong about those that I know? It makes no sense that I should pick a person not for their own attributes but because of what someone else thinks.
Friends themselves are often illogical. They tell me what I should think, who I should speak to, what I should say.. and yet they also tell me that I should do what I believe to be best, then tell me not to do it because it is wrong, even though it is correct to do that which I think is right. How does that work? What am I supposed to do? Do I follow their advice or do what I think I should do even if they tell me it is wrong?
I look around now and I see confusion. Nothing makes sense to me at all. I try to understand, I try to learn, but the more that I do the less order anything seems to have. I try to be a better person, to do the right thing, to live and conduct myself accordingly but I find myself feeling more lost and alone by the day.
More than that, I find myself hurting more and more. I am so tired of this heartache. I am so tired of not knowing what to do or who to talk to. I am so tired of feeling so out of place, beleaguered, beaten, baffled. So I cling to what I do know.
