(IT FINALLY OCCURED TO ME TO POST THIS SECTION OF MY DIARY UP HERE)
Dear Friend,
I am a misfit, the unwanted, the person nobody cares about or understands. For me this diary became my friend, my listening ear, my sanctuary. Have you ever found that there was nobody there for you? Then you know as well as me the power a diary can hold.
I hope that this diary can help give people an insight in what it’s like to be part of the unwanted, so that you can try and understand the hurt and pain I and many like me have suffered.
November 2005
The dreaded day has finally arrived! I’m on the plane now, slowly moving further and further from my life. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life; saying goodbye. Only a week ago my life was normal, well what is normal? Normal to me is that I was just your average 16 year old guy. I was doing well at school and I had a crush on the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her name was Holly, she was in my form and most of my classes; I had loved her since I was in year 7 but never had the guts to tell her. Well finally I found them, a little too late though, and told her how I felt about her… the only thing was it was on my last day at my school and my last day of existence in England. My timing isn’t perfect!
My third meal of the flight just arrived; it’s surprising because I do actually like aeroplane food. Air Singapore is cool, you get a sleep mask and everything. I’m still trying to figure out this remote though!
Ok back to the narrative… So yes saying goodbye. It is common nowadays for people to move from one place to another, but not for me. I’ve lived at 115 Newnham Drive, Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, for my whole entire life (well I was like two months old when we moved in but that’s nothing). So you can imagine living in the exact same place for 16years meant that I had lived with and around the exact same people also. Well yes I had! I grew up with a guy called Patrick Neil. He was my best friend from since we were babies, throughout primary school… and then came high school. We both went onto different high schools, eventually Paddy moved further away and after about a year we pretty much stopped talking to each other, so much for life long friends! I guess deep down that was the first major hurt in my life. Me and Paddy did everything together, I shared his pain when his Nan died, he was always the strong one in our friendship. He would invent our games and go running and diving over hedges and into nettles… I was always held back but he encouraged me to do most things. One of my favourite memories of Paddy is about a tree house we had. He had climbed up into it before me; I was halfway up the tree when I saw him falling past me. He landed with his back on a trolley! I was so frightened, almost in tears, but Paddy just started laughing! He wasn’t like some dumb muscle, but man I saw him as the greatest person and best friend anybody could have.
Loosing Paddy was the beginning of my sorrowful story. Now, thinking about it, I can see that exact moment as the very start of my growing mistrust in people. Considering I have already started this whole “background information” thing here, I might as well finish up to today. Year 7 was a very basic year, I made new friends obviously but kept the friends that had came to the same high school with me from my primary school. Sean and Ste their names are. Year 8 was the same, nothing interesting happened at all… Year 9 however is a completely different story. I got suspended from school! Me, the perfect A* student! It was my fault though… I took weed into school, for reasons unimportant, and eventually I paid the price. As soon as the head teacher heard about it she wrote me a letter saying I had been expelled, but somehow or another there must have been a teacher or a few that stood up for me and the punishment became a month suspension. It was a good time for me really; I had a lot of time to reflect on my life and what had happened. I have to admit that I hurt some people in the process, but I was hurt quite badly by a few people I had held very closely. That was incident number two that added to my dieing trust in people.
The next major thing that happened shook my town, but mostly it shook my entire family. It’s an area of my family that we have never really spoke about since it happened, just brushed it away under the rug. Here it is anyway. My cousin had lived with us for awhile, he was a person with problems, and eventually we could take having him with us (he actually stole my brand new playstation 2 games and sold them…whilst he was living in the same room as me). It wasn’t until after that though that major thing number three occurred. My cousin was found guilty of murder. He had apparently brutally killed a lad, a lad that I actually knew and had came to our house plenty of times, and eventually he had confessed that it was him. There was quite a scandal over my cousin’s girlfriend’s involvement in the whole thing but it didn’t really go anywhere.
Well as you can probably guess that was something that shocked us all. Sometimes I question if I was ever going to be told about it… I found out by some graffiti on a slide at a local park and it was finally my aunty that told me the truth. A memory that will never leave me is my visit to him in prison. It was one of the saddest days in my life. Walking down the room with all the people sitting behind their tables in their orange suits hoping someone is coming to visit them. I lost my fear of them because they had no interest in me; they all just sat waiting and hoping. I gave my cousin a hug when I was him… to tell you the truth I was ashamed of him and I couldn’t really look at him or at anyone, only the floor. I was the one who requested the visit. I thought that it would be cool, something I could talk about in school the following week, how wrong I was. (I don’t have to mention the stick I got for it in school)
I started writing this an hour ago. Time is nothing really, it’s as mouldable as most things in our world. In only an hour I have relayed about 15years of my life in less than two A4 pages of paper. Is that how unimportant we all are?
And then that leads the start of my ramblings… sitting on the plane, on my way into the vast depths of the unknown. My parents decided it was high time to leave Ellesmere Port, and the state of England meant it was no longer good enough for a happy life, for us at least. So they chose New Zealand. Here I am now, four hours away from Auckland.
December 2005
It was like a holiday at first. A new city, a new way of life, and best of all it was hot! Hot and Sunny! All the local kids were still in school, but that didn’t matter because our apartment is right in the city centre, 5 mins from the main street, Queen Street. I went up the Sky Tower, the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, and man did I crap myself being that high!!!
That’s not important though. I honestly have to say that nothing of any importance has happened. Only experiencing a Christmas in summer… now that is a freaky thing for someone like me who is used to cold, snowy Christmases.
January 2006
Mum has started us on a sailing course. It is awesome! We sail a small boat called an Optimist (opti). They are fun… but the best part about the sailing is Jonny. He is my age (everyone else is like 8-12) and he’s English too. He moved here like just after us. Ok yes, he is from a completely different part of England (posh) with a way posh accent but that doesn’t matter, he is my first friend here.
September 2007
Wow!!! I forgot I even had this diary till just now. But apparently it’s something I should start up again. My psychologist told me to re-visit it and continue it. So I’ve typed up the old one (Nov and Dec 2006).
I will explain it all now. It seems that my past had a bigger effect on me than I had thought. I now have counselling from school and a psychologist from a child mental health place called Whirinaki. A while back I had a kind of “breakdown”. I don’t fit in the world I live in. I never have really, but that had never bothered me before. Then one day it did bother me. I was on a school geography trip and the only people that I was hanging around with were a group of girls, none of the lads wanted me and even when we had to stay the night in single-sex dorms I was left till last and placed with a group of three Asian guys. Though I never heard anything, I knew that people were talking about me, I could feel their stares even when they weren’t looking.
The day we got back and I was home, it hit me…I don’t belong. I sat in the bath and thought about the past few years… I didn’t fit anywhere. The next day I was in school and we had a house assembly… just before it started I collapsed mentally and emotionally. I couldn’t bare the weight of everyone around me, the eyes staring, the voices so loud. I ran to my form teacher and asked to talk to her; the next thing I knew, I was in a room talking to a counsellor, Ms Denize. Ms Denize passed me onto Paul Wedge, the psychologist.
...TO BE CONTINUED