Kat Beeton
Growing up, if that’s what you really want to call it, is definitely not the easiest space in time to inhabit. My formative years were enough to bake a monster. I’d like to think that is not how I turned out. Maybe a bit crispy round the edges but not too bad overall. For everyone watching, my life was pretending to be a traditional nucleus of mum, dad, and spoiled kid. And it wasn’t too hard to keep this going when we never stayed anywhere long enough for people to notice the cracks in our stories.
Legend has it, I went to thirteen different schools. Only two secondary so things seemed to calm down a bit there – probably more to do with the area they covered than a slowdown of the house hopping. It was like flitting between the multiverse of my realities and for a while, each place had a different version of me. My last name was never the same twice in a row on the schoolbooks. The surnames came back around in rotation, when the debt collectors and dedicated landlords had forgotten, but there were times when I genuinely forgot who I was supposed to be. It was rare to spend more than a year in the same house and there was even a stint in an old schoolhouse that was a barely used factory but that is another story.
At some point, I began to expect it, this nomadic life we pretended we didn’t have. Always ready to throw my best things in the back of a car at a moment’s notice, I had posters on the wall but never pictures. I had an argument with a temporary friend at school that I needed to sit in the good seat because I would be gone by the end of the month and so I was. After a while, there was no point in making friends because I couldn’t keep them. Sort of like the way I can’t keep a plant alive but with less death.
My father drank the rent and when he didn’t, my mother spent it all the day after payday. I was reliably informed that it was all his fault but when he didn’t live with us anymore, we still kept moving. Nothing really changed until I had the power to change it. This kind of life can be exciting and a great chance to flex your acting skills, but the loneliness is the kind that digs in deep and teaches you it’s meant to be that way. When I look back now, it was a long time before I grew out of that time and some of the damage it did is still with me in both good and bad ways. The first step I took on the road out of there was when I made a friend that stuck. I’m still stuck with her today but it’s a good kind of sticky, like too much jam on your toast and a goofy grin.
I hated the dark times I spent in my own head. Watching everyone else’s version of normal, I convinced myself that I must have done something diabolical because I clearly didn’t deserve to be one of them. Now that I can see it for what it was, I am grateful for some things. Getting lost in my imagination and the weird and wonderful places it took me. Hiding in cupboards and sinking into the pages of so many different books that for a while were my only friends. All the stories that seeped in and took root, the words that I can spin into my own tales and performances. There is no point in staying in that time or wearing the offcuts of it. But I will take what it gave me and run with it.