That little voice inside

She knew she didn't know how to handle the language that well... so, she made a habit of observing what her friends tweeted to one another, and chose not to write anything back, for fear of not making a complete fool out of herself. Often there were jokes told, and God! how she wanted to reply with a joke which she was sure would have made her friends burst into laughter! Or at least she hoped so. Yet she was sitting there numb, eyes fixed on the desktop computer, wishing so badly she had been born in an English-speaking country! It didn't even matter to her that just a few months ago, she was in a neighbor-country translating for the FDA, and they didn't complain. Nope... she was staring at her Twitter page, as if she was frozen in time, convinced that her English knowledge equals ZERO and that nothing she'd say would make sense anyway. 

The thing is she's always had a problem when it came to self-esteem. And that problem dated from way back when she was a teenager. All the success she's had in her extra-curricular activities -whether singing at the Children's Club and the Church choir or participating at some school competition seemed to annoy her classmates, which never hesitated in making her feel unwanted and uncool, and never missed a chance to humiliate her for the most childish reasons. When in fact she was hardly the nerd type. She would only have greater marks at her favorite subjects.  She was just an ordinary student. But today, she was still feeling the same pain inside like it was 1996, on that warm day of spring when she was in her 7th grade, just after having won that 1st prize at the National Human Rights Competition, held in the southern part of the country. She'd made her school (located on the opposite part of the country)  famous, yet she had no expectations, and absolutely no idea of what she'd had done for the school. Of course, teachers congratulated her and someone wrote some article in the local newspaper, but it wasn't until later on, sometime in 2003, that she found out there was a photo of herself in the school's hallway, just as you enter the school. To her, none of this attention really mattered. She was just a child with a dream. And winning that prize changed nothing in her heart, she was still as sociable and friendly as she'd been before the whole contest thing. Only this time, everyone around her changed. And not for the better. Whether the change took the form of friends who would smile in her face, but tell lies to others behind her back, or children seeking to befriend her so that she could help them with the homework and then forget she ever existed, the change happened nonetheless. And it made her wish she hadn't participated in that freaking contest in the first place. :( She would've helped them with the homework anyway, as she had done so many times before. But her heart could not take in all that rancour. 

[...]

 So she took this pain and had some more added on top of it in high school, then in college, up to later on at work, and she carried all this amount of pain throughout the years, thinking she's never good enough for this world, that nothing she will say or do will ever even be necessary to this Planet. That all the love she has to spread is unimportant and definitely not welcome. Hence, a great amount of low self-esteem. The ever present need to apologize for every minor thing she feels might bother or upset people. The need to feel accepted before making a decision and embarking on a journey towards whatever it is that she has in mind to do with her life.

Fortunately, experience along with some wonderful people, life, fate and even herself came up with answers, and as time went by, things took a favourable turn. But she's still not completely healed. She needs to learn more. She needs to take action. She needs to stop taking every silly little thing to heart. She needs to stop waiting for the fairytale life, the fairytale love, the fairytale friends. And she definitely needs to stop staring incontrollably at this Twitter page. She needs to stop worrying and let the tiny voice inside her head do the talking for her, at least this one time. [...]

'So go on girl, write whatever joke's coming through your mind. As long as it's not obscene. LOL. Just write like the wind, as Stephanie would say. :) Don't worry about the consequences. The worst kind of loss is losing your true self. Which you know you don't want to do. And stop asking yourself what they would say. You're not in 7th grade anymore. This is different. In the best way kind of different. You might not have the best English out there, but they got it so far, so I guess it's ok. This is Bean's family, no reason to worry.'

Guess it wouldn't hurt if she listened to the tiny lil' voice in her head from time to time.