I’ve always been a foolish girl, running around looking for some melodrama to fill my life. At twelve I wanted to be known as someone special, somebody who had managed to achieve the impossible. Clearly that didn’t work out. By the time I hit fourteen, I’ve lowered my impossible goal. Realising that it would take so much more to get me where I wanted, I started to accept my own life. A part of me still wanted some explosion in my teenage years though. I wished with all my might for some little drama.

You see, I’ve been reading ever since I could remember. From fairy tales to crime novels, I’ve had a taste of pretty much everything. I used to be obsessed with those sappy teen novels, the typical boy-meet-girl type. But at fourteen I picked up my first adult novel and was hooked. It was a Jodi Picoult book, and for the first time I started to see some beauty in tragedy. As I moved on to similar books, I was unconsciously bewitched. Suddenly I wanted to be the tragic heroines in those books, wearing my sufferings like medals. Foolishly I believed that these tragic heroines would all be granted a ‘happily ever after’, and that if something terrible happened to me I could make it through unscathed. I was so stupid.

I was still wishing for some romantic tragedy as I stepped into my sixteenth year. My life was at its fullest, I was surrounded by family and friends. I was so happy, so incredibly happy that it made me blind to many things. There were little twinges of regret here and there that nothing big had happened to me, but generally I viewed the world through lens so pink that I could hardly see a thing. I naively assumed that everyone around me were as happy as I was.

I was dreadfully wrong. I didn’t know it then, but I finally got what I wished for all these years. Tragedy had hit, but I was so intoxicated with my own happiness and myself that I didn’t see it until it was too late. And I realised then that life was not a novel. I know, I should’ve realised that much earlier than sixteen, but I’ve just been so lucky. It was just as they said. Be careful what you wish for, because it may just come true.

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Author guidance for This work

I've been blessed with happiness and good luck for most of my life, yet I stupidly longed for some tragedy to spice it up. And it took a terrible tragedy to teach me to appreciate my life, even though the worst of it did not directly touched me. These are just musings of a girl and her changed outlook on life.

updated Feb 11 by HeyJude