Justien was 2 days away from being evicted from her apartment when the idea came to her to write her story and because everyone could see that it was sure to appeal to the public’s zest for scandal, her banker was quick to agree to her proposal to allow her enough time for the manuscript to be released after which she could pay off her mortgage in full from the proceeds.  Now, six months later, she was waiting for the lawyer to call to go down to his office to have the documents drawn up which would allow her to pay up in full.  She stretched herself full length on the sofa which had certainly seen her through some hard times, but would now have to go to make room for the updated version which she meant to have as soon as the deal came through.

She lay back more comfortably, closed her eyes and relived the story which was about to hit the headlines of all the major tabloids.

Confessions of a Teenage Valium Junkie

By Justien

I had read about these things in English literature but as an ambitious ten-year-old preparing for the common entrance exam to high school, I never dreamed that the portrayal of people who had no internal life of their own and spent their time living off others like a washed-out version of a colonial power would apply to me. No one could have made me believe that I would spend the major part of my adolescence and young adulthood trying to break free of people who tried to make me into their slave without my even being aware of it. 

At 11¾ they made it seem as if moving up into the adolescent stage of life was a crime and it was their duty to prosecute me to the full extent of the law- their law which they wrote and changed

as new ideas came to mind as to how best to add new ways of breaking me down so that they could take my dreams away and in their place give me an image of myself as a pale reflection of themselves.

In high school I was in the top three of the class but I was living in fear.  After I complained of feeling constantly tired my mother took me to a doctor that actually started a family crisis because he said that I was teetering  on the brink of malnutrition and my mother started to look at me differently; she accused me of telling a lie to her because she said she didn’t know why of her three children, I should be the only one suffering from that condition.  My father started taking home Scott’s Emulsion and Ferrous Compound for me, but after they called them into a PTA meeting when I was fourteen, he stopped.