It’s NOT YOUR FAULT,

if you are not as much a hero as you think, after all…/1

This is not something one in the right mind would admit, not that I claim I AM one.

who, I mean, how many people in the world know what it means to be away from home for years, having left not knowing when the next, if any, chance to go back for a visit would probably be?

At a certain age and under specific circumstances, many of us, if not all, feel an irresistible urge to split with our folks and fly the nest.

As part of a big family and the last child, I had an early embarkation on this issue. I had good parents. I mean, very good parents; the kind of good that makes you freaking confused. There was, and still is, nothing wrong with them; not any I could tell.

For as long as I remember, I was attended to, quite normally. Every morning, I woke up to the school uniform still hot from dad’s ironing, and had the breakfast mummy had prepared. I never did my own laundry or lifted a finger particularly outside of a school girl’s circle of duties; never did I see my parents fight or disrespect each other in front of us, as they were madly in love, in their own traditional way, of course, which was not the most common way most parents felt about their marriage those days.

All through my teens, I kept grappling with the incomprehensible void and the ensuing feeling of guilt an ungrateful person might feel towards the people who have always made the greatest sacrifices for her. I could not tell what was wrong, but I could feel, by intuition, that something was certainly not right.

This, in a way, was corroborated through the psychosomatic symptoms that began to emerge later in my teens.

During my puberty years, I became sort of eerie. Anything that could physically go wrong with a school girl, began to go wrong with me.

I had long PMS, painful periods, food allergy, air allergy, bladder infection, insomnia, anemia, chronic headaches, chronic nausea. If I weren’t obliged to go to school, I would have called in sick every other day.

It scared me how very serious every little thing was to me. I could sit around for hours and not notice the slightest hustle and bustle taking…