Our summer issue is out now. Our young correspondent Margot Tubbiolo shares her insights on the power in falling and picking yourself back up
Fall From Grace
Fall and rise again
by Margot Tubbiolo
I rose and bloomed into the beautiful person I am today
Everyone has a fear….a fear of falling, of letting someone in, of losing, of trusting. But what good comes out of fear? I have a theory that everyone has a fall from grace, meaning something they’re terrified of. Something that is deep within their soul. It’s a cognitive notion of, “this will happen to me because it always happens.” When you think like that, a downfall is around the corner.
I want to know what your fall from grace is, what your core beliefs are about yourself? Personally mine is a fear of abandonment. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, all I know is I have it. It’s not like a parent abandoned me at one stage, no major traumas have occurred in my life. It’s simply just a crippling fear of people leaving me. This is my downfall because I believe, I imagine it into reality a lot of the time – a kind of a Catch 22 if you will. I can’t seem to shake it either way.
The thought is materialising the fear. Some might argue that your teenage years are a giant fall from grace. A leap into a world that is unknown to you and most end up tripping on the jump over. I definitely had a few stumbles myself. I’d say it’s better to have your fall from grace in this time, because then you’re not one of those people that peaked in ‘high school’. This isn’t diminishing the difficulty of how hard it is to have all these emotions as a teen. However, I think for some, it’s a need to fall.
I needed to fall to be happy at my age now. I dealt with a lot of inconceivable emotions as a 13 to 16 year old. I went through a depression that was (like for a lot of people) debilitating. I was never in school, I would never leave my house or my bed for that matter and I just had no idea what was going on with me. This was my big fall from grace. I got so low that I was harming myself for a while. I think In this time I pushed people away – that’s where the fear of abandonment comes in. I wanted to make people leave before they’d see how I was “too much to deal with”. Leave before you get left, was the ideology.
The reason I’m getting into this is because I want to get across that even though this time of my life was so hard, I wouldn’t change it for the world. I learned so much about my mind. I learned how to look after myself at such a young age and I taught myself how to be happy. Falling is never a bad thing, because directly after a fall is a rise. I rose and bloomed into the beautiful person I am today.
