"She is soft and sensitive, and she watches, watches, watches." For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to Teenager by Mia Döring above.
She has plain brown hair and weighs 11 stone, which she finds repulsive. In her diaries: poetry and drawings and blue bic pen swirls of horses manes, she has written over and over lists of things she must achieve: lose weight, stop eating, get a boyfriend. Be interesting. Nothing is enough. Nothing she can offer is enough. Nothing she has to give is enough.
She helps, she is afraid, she wants to be useful. She hovers. She hopes. She writes gratitude lists. She apologises, she says sorry, she excuses herself. Playing as a child she had to be urged by adults to take part. She was always excruciatingly self-aware. One time a friend's mother overheard her talking to a doll as if the doll was real baby. She and the friend's mother made brief eye contact as the mother smiled her way up the stairs of her home. Shame stung and suffocated and although she continued playing in that house she would never let go to that extent again. She would never lose control like that again. And then the time came for parents to stop organising playdates and then the time came for street playing to stop and although she didn't know it then, one Summer day she called into neighbours for the last time, she eventually played her last play in the green, cycled her last cycle home.
She makes up fake social activities so she doesn't look like a loser, even though she isn't a loser and isn't even sure what a 'loser' is, anyway. She befriends the outcasts, the unpopular, the unwanted, the laughed at, the excluded. She goes on walks with them at lunch time and feels sorry for them, like she is a charity worker, and also grateful, so grateful, for them. Her enormous heart aches with empathy and she wishes she wasn't so soft. Such a pushover. So weak. She wishes she had a bit of the edge and harshness some of the Cool Girls have. Some of their bite. She will never have their bite. She does have bite, she doesn't realise she has bite. She gets bite eventually. She relinquishes this desire and tries to forge her own identity but finds it hard to know who she is. She has never gotten to know herself. She doesn't know how to begin. She has never been validated. The who of her has never been heard. She has never been seen.
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.