My Personal Story, daar ben ik op het moment mee bezig. Supergaaf om te doen, en ik ben zo blij dat ik ervoor heb gekozen hier voor te gaan! I love it. Vandaag heb ik mijn tweede post geplaatst in de groep van Message To Millions en ik neem jullie natuurlijk weer mee in het verhaal. Het begint al te komen, dat verhaal voor on stage… ;-)

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It’s my birthday and I have no friends. I’m too weird, or strange, not popular enough. I just didn’t fit in, you know? At that point I had been given the message over and over again that nobody likes me, really, and it’s my fault because I am altogether too much. Too outspoken, too direct, too strongly opinionated. Too selfish and too much of a fantasist. I am always looking around me for how to behave but never seem to get it right. I forget to act normal and instead I’m me and it’s not appreciated. So I’m looking at this day ahead of me and I know very well it’ll not be a happy birthday, unless I make it so.⁣⁣
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My parents gave me a diary in the morning. I wanted that for a very long time. I read every book in the library and I want to create words and sentences and share my inner world. This world that was hidden because I knew it was even more strange than what people already knew of me. So I sit on my bed and I think: What shall I write? And then I decide: I write the story of my birthday. Of how I would have liked it to be.⁣⁣
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I write about how happy I am, how many presents I got and about the friends that came to visit. I write about how we had so much fun and how we all ate cake and how my friends sang for me. I create this wonderful loving, beautiful birthday and I love it. I love writing about it, I can actually feel it while I do. Like it actually happened. And it’s intimate, because it’s me. I open up and share myself in my diary. My secret life, the life I yearn for. Where I am loved and can be myself and nobody tells me to be otherwise.⁣⁣
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Three days later, my mother comes into my room. She tells me with a rather stern look: I have read you’re your diary. My room wobbles and my ears start to ring. I vaguely notice that my heart hurts. I look at her, unable to speak. She goes on: Oh don’t look at me like that! I know I’m not supposed to but let’s not make a big deal of it. No, let’s talk about something else. Because you lied, Marieke. You are not supposed to lie in your diary, that’s very bad. All that stuff you made up about your birthday, you’ve ruined your diary now. You might as well throw it out.⁣⁣
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I sit there unable to grasp the situation. And in that very moment I decide that I am wrong. I get it wrong. Because I thought she was going to apologize for reading my diary and I was already in the process of forgiving her. But instead I am being attacked for what I wrote. I didn’t know that was wrong. I thought I could write what I wanted. I thought reading someone’s diary was wrong. I remember thinking, but don’t all writers make stuff up? I thought there was no harm in that. So it becomes clear to me, that my perspective on how things work and what is good and what is bad is wrong. That my beliefs are wrong and that I better get with the program because obviously I’m making mistakes. It sinks in that I need to pay more attention, work harder on fitting in and be better at it.⁣⁣
And because of that, I decide to never, ever share who I really am on the inside again, with anyone, not even on paper. I decide: all of the real me is secret. Because if only they knew. If they knew what I truly think and believe, I’m done.⁣⁣