My mind was sitting in the corner, knitting. It was knitting a giant shapeless sweater with which to cover the whole world. All you could hear was the endless ‘clack, clack, clack’ of the knitting needles. The racket of it was unbearable and I was feeling very irritated. ‘Fuck you, mind,’ I said after a while, ‘can’t you ever stop knitting?’

We don’t get on, you see – me and my mind. We don’t see eye to eye at all. Usually, we just sit there sullenly at opposite ends of the table glowering at each other, seething away inside, emitting bad vibes the like of which you can’t possibly imagine. The atmosphere in the room would be foul beyond belief, if the truth were to be known. Toxic isn’t the word for it, toxic is a wholly inadequate term for what used to go on between me and my mind back in those days. In short, there was some serious bad shit going down and there’s no point in me sitting here trying to deny it to you.

‘Perhaps the two of you should have gone to see a therapist,’ you interject archly, trying your best to be tactful. ‘That would have been the responsible thing to do.’ It’s obvious to me however that you’re assuming it’s all my fault, which everyone always does. They take one look at me and assume that it’s all my fault. I’m the innocent one in this story though – I was totally innocent of any wrong-doing and all you’re doing is victim-blaming. ‘Well, you must have done something wrong’, you say glibly, ‘or else why would all of this happen to you. It doesn’t happen to normal people, after all…’ Stuff like that never happens to normal people so if it happens to you then you know for sure that you’re a freak! How can you possibly deny it? When bad stuff happens then it must be your fault so you should just suck it up…

The thing that happened to you in the first place is quite bad enough anyway of course but then you realize that none of that shit would have happened to you if you hadn’t been a freak and that awareness is the icing on the cake, so to speak. That takes it to the next level, as you might imagine. You start to turn in on yourself when that happens – ‘your pain is your shame’, sort of thing. The lessons are there for all to learn – “It’s wrong to be wrong, so we’re told. It’s always wrong to be wrong so just don’t do it. Just don’t do the wrong thing – how hard is that to understand? It’s not rocket-science, is it? It’s right to be right and it’s wrong to be wrong and there’s nothing else we can say about it. It’s a mistake to make a mistake so just bloody don’t.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time and yet I had known all along that it had been a mistake. I just couldn’t accept this however and so I pretended to myself that my life was normal. I pretended every day, year after year. ‘My life is normal,’ I said to myself. It just wasn’t true however – I had made a mistake and no one wanted to know me after that. No one wanted to know me before that either, come to think of it. They knew that things weren’t right – they could tell things weren’t right just to look at me. The trapped look in my eyes, the strange sibilant hissing I made instead of talking, the way I’d suddenly start panting for no reason. I should have known better, of course. I did know better, but I was – all the same – quite powerless to avoid my fate. I carried on anyway. I carried on regardless. That’s the way it always is with fate though, isn’t it? There are two sorts of people in this world, we could say. There are those who are powerless to avoid their fate and know it, and there are those who are powerless to avoid their fate and like to pretend otherwise…

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