I used to get nosebleeds a lot when I was younger.
I used to get a lot of things that weren’t particularly desirable when I was younger; crises, bullied, every illness that every child got and then some that none ever did…
These were not the most fun of times.
I wouldn’t exactly say I enjoyed the nosebleeds and they certainly seemed distressing to anyone around me when I got one, but I didn’t really mind them.
Now the crises, these I minded very much. They would leave me screaming and crying and unable to feel anything other than an all-consuming pain that felt like would never end.
John Green once said or wrote something about the isolation of pain and Virginia Woolf something about the lack of words for pain. I understand it in this moment because I don’t think I could organise any string of words together that would make you understand just how painful these crises were, but I know the agony I felt was so intense that I preferred the idea of feeling nothing at all.
The complexities of junior secondary school social etiquette were also quite frankly much worse than any nosebleed I got, even the one that lasted an hour and left me feeling light-headed and my parents wondering whether or not it was silly to rush a child to the hospital at 11:00 pm over a nosebleed. I never seemed to be able to get it right.
So while I didn’t like the smell of blood or the rush to get my clothes into the washing machine (I learned the hard way that blood becomes very hard to wash out if you leave it in for too long), the nosebleeds didn’t really bother me. They weren’t painful, just inconvenient. Besides, they had their perks. They saved me from boring classes and gave me an excuse to stay in the schools sick-bay which was almost always pretty empty and I could be left blissfully alone. They also freaked out everyone else so they’d leave me alone for a bit.
But I got older, my immune system became less of a joke, the crises got fewer and further between, the bullying stopped and so did the nosebleeds. Fewer hospital visits, fewer anger-fuelled visits of my father to my school, and fewer shirts with blood all over the front.
And one day I am sitting in the parking lot of my hostel having a breakdown of which the main trigger was a nightmare roommate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy who made my room a living hell and how I was going to cough up about 70% of my allowance to fix a roommate’s (a different one) phone which the brokenness of was admittedly partly, if not entirely, my fault.
Of course, there were other factors involved, is any breakdown ever really just because of one or two things? There were also friendships that were falling apart, declining grades and health, a missing family heirloom that was literally worth gold seeing as that was what it was made of, a remarkable spike in the number of panic attacks per week and a couple of other things that left me crying in my hostels’ parking lot.
I would like to romanticise this scene and make it a lot prettier in your head than it was in reality, but it was really just a girl folded into herself with her head resting on her hands which were resting on her knees sobbing as quietly as possible.
It was quite pathetic really.
And I knew this.
I didn’t want to be the year one student crying in public so I tried desperately to stop crying but somehow knowing just how pathetic it all was just made me cry more.
At some point in between sobs, I wiped my face with my hands and my palm came away bloody and I realised I had a nosebleed. I hadn’t had a nosebleed in years.
So I started to laugh.
Not because I’d finally completely lost it and this was my “The Joker” moment, but because I used to get so many nosebleeds and I survived that.
I had survived infection after infection, illness after illness, crisis after crisis, and hospital visit after hospital visit before.
I had survived bullying that ranged from good old simple exclusion to being pushed down the stairs before.
I had survived nosebleeds before.
I’d survive this too.
