The Independent one

What did you do when you left School?

Did you move home....Did you feel you could or did you have a home to go to?

Or did you go off somewhere else to go off exploring or try and find somewhere else that you could fit?

Did you make sure everyone knew you did not need them?

It is a familiar path for many ex-boarders. They finish school and they go travelling, often alone and often for months at a time. I did exactly that. At eighteen I left for eight months, and I was fiercely proud of my ability to travel to far flung places and not needing anyone. I certainly did not need my own mother.

When I got to university, I remember being quite patronising towards the other eighteen and nineteen year olds around me. They were away from their parents for the first time, some of them were homesick and most were over excited about having the freedom to drink alcohol.  I could not really understand it. I had just spent eight months travelling the world on my own with almost nothing. What did they have to be homesick about?   I am now aware that I had detached from my own home and mum aged eleven.

I look at that young woman differently now. The independence and the capability were real, but they were also part of my survival personality, the self I had built to cope with being sent away so young. Underneath that capable exterior, I also had an eating disorder. I was turning to food to manage feelings and regulate myself as It felt all that was available to me. On the outside, I did not need anyone and I was managing everything alone. Yet, underneath, there was a part of me that was not managing at all.  It took me another 5 years to finally address that. 

This is something I hear often. For many people, boarding school becomes a kind of home, however much they longed to leave it and however much they rebelled against it while they were there. So when it ends, and the structure disappears overnight, something has to fill that space.

For some people it is drugs. For others it is alcohol, food, sex or another way of managing feelings that stays hidden and secretive, often for years. On one hand, you are capable, strong, independent. On the other, there is a younger part of you that does not know how to be without the walls that used to hold everything together, and that part often finds its own quiet way of coping.

Is this part of your story too?

What was it like for you when you left school? What did you do, and how did you hold those two conflicting parts of yourself, if you had them too?

Use these prompts to journal and reflect for yourself or you are welcome to reply to me. 

Amelia