The Girl Between Two Worlds

A teenaged girl learns the hard way how to see through lies and change for the better

I used to think I could just rebrand my whole life, like changing my surname and pretending the old one never existed.

My generation had a great many places to hide from the love of unwanted parents. There were a host of distractions to fill my time, a plethora of alternatives to my father's Christian faith. The confusion and shadows of the modern world became my camouflage from him. I chose my friends from the outcasts, from the broken because I wanted an alternative to the world I grew up in. A world that was falling apart long before I decided to leave it behind.

When Mum left Dad, something snapped in me. Not loud, more like a tiny crack you only notice when the light hits it. I tried living in both worlds, her world and his, and it basically ripped me in half. The emptiness that got in through those cracks was… different. Darker. I started seeing things I hadn’t let myself see before. Like how Dad suddenly acted around young women who were way too young for him, laughing too loud, trying way too hard. The kind of laugh that screams, “I’m still desirable, okay?” I remember thinking, he’s too old for that. He shouldn’t be moving on just because Mum didn’t want him anymore.

Something inside me went cold.

Psychology felt like the only light I had left. I read textbooks like other girls binge romance novels. Freud, Jung, cognitive models, anything. My mind felt like an attic full of dusty boxes nobody had touched, and I thought if I learned enough, I could finally open them. Maybe even help other people open theirs.

But deep down I wanted to figure out why Dad acted the way he did. And why it made me so angry.

The depression didn’t show up all at once. It kind of slid into my life, sneaking under doors, sticking to my ankles, following me around like the shadow you get in winter when the sun never really rises. It eventually got so heavy I felt scared of my own thoughts. I hurt myself more than once, and the marks are still there. That’s when the clinic became the only thing that made sense. I told myself it was mature and logical and grounded in science.

But the clinic smelled like a hospital and felt sterile in the deepest possible sense. The walls looked dirty even though they were white. Everyone’s smile looked pasted on.

And every night I had the same nightmare. Demons pulling on invisible strings tied to my arms and legs, laughing behind me, making me move like some creepy marionette. Puppet girl, they whispered. Puppet girl.

I’d wake up sweating, convinced there was something wrong not just inside me, but in the whole system I’d put my trust in.

Dad only came once.

I thought he’d hold it together, at least for a visit, but he snapped at the resident psychiatrist almost immediately. He talked to her like she was clueless. I knew exactly what he thought of the whole profession and it annoyed me. I thought he was being so unfair, so stubborn.

Then he basically made me choose between him and Mum. As awful as that moment was, I weirdly think he was right about one thing: trying to belong to both of them at once was destroying me. I was trying to speak both of their emotional languages and it was like playing interpreter for two people who don’t even want to understand each other. When I told him I was choosing Mum, his jaw literally dropped. But he accepted it. He shot this death-glare at Dr. Hayden and said, “They’re harmless enough. They don’t heal anyone, but they won’t kill you. Maybe once you see that for yourself, we can talk. There’s nothing I can say right now that you’ll listen to. But my door is always open to you Sophie.”

I folded into myself like I was trying to disappear. Part of me wished he’d hugged me. Another part wanted him out of the room before he ruined anything else. His words stabbed even though I knew he said them out of worry. I didn’t want prayer or sermons or “spiritual solutions.” I wanted real help.

I moved in with Mum and kept going to counselling. It took forever to admit the truth: they weren’t helping me. Not in any deep way.

It all fell apart on some random Tuesday. Dr. Hayden had that soft smile she always used, the one that felt like it would tear if you poked it.

She tapped her pen and said, “So, Sophie… let’s explore what core belief is contributing to the heaviness you’ve been feeling.”

I stared at her, at the potted plant in the corner and the posters telling me to “stay positive.”

“Can you just tell me,” I said, “why I still feel like this? Why I wake up feeling like my body isn’t even mine? Why my dreams scare me more than being awake?”

“Dreams,” she said, doing that wise nod thing, “are symbolic expressions of the subconscious. Your mind may be externalizing inner conflict.”

“No,” I cut in. “Why can’t you help me? Why am I the one doing all the work while you sit there smiling?”

Her smile fell apart. “Healing is a process, Sophie. It takes time.”

“You’ve been saying that for more than a year.”

She crossed her legs and tried to look confident again. “It might be resistant depression. Some people don’t respond well to cognitive frameworks.”

I laughed, but it sounded wrong even to me. “You don’t know why I’m like this, do you?”

She blinked slowly. “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“But it’s the truth.”

And watching her face tighten, I finally saw it: She’s guessing. They all are. They’ve been guessing from the beginning.

I left the session hugging myself because no one else was there to do it.

A horrible thought hit me:

If they don’t understand what they’re doing,
why did I want to become one of them?

Why did I worship their theories?
Why did I spend nights convincing myself every feeling had a chart or a diagram or a diagnosis behind it?

Maybe psychology wasn’t a torch after all.
Maybe it was just a little match. And mine had burned out ages ago.

And then it clicked: the “health problems” I kept trying to get validated, the dizziness, the constant exhaustion, the random aches were just shadows of something deeper. Not a physical disorder. Not a chemical imbalance I could blame. Not a label I could hide behind.

It was something spiritual. And I felt cut off from the God who used to feel close to me, the God I thought actually understood me. I still prayed sometimes, but it felt like talking to a wall. And I didn’t know how to fix that either. I knew that God still loved me but He felt far away When did that happen? Why had I built this wall inside me. When did it get so high?

Dad’s voice kept echoing in my head. Not the stubborn doctrine nor the political convictions that used to make me roll my eyes, but the quiet words he said before everything blew up:

“My door is always open.”

For months I’d avoided even thinking about that sentence because it felt like a trap. Like going back would mean admitting he was right about everything. And honestly, part of me hated that idea. I didn’t want to hand him that victory. I didn’t want him to smirk or quote Bible verses or act like my entire breakdown was some grand lesson proving his worldview.

I resented him for that. I resented how much he wanted to be right. Or at least how much I thought he wanted it.

But the longer I sat with the thought, the more it twisted into something else. What if being “right” wasn’t actually the thing he cared about? What if that was just the surface-level noise I’d been focusing on because it was easier than seeing the truth underneath?

He didn’t want to win an argument.
He wanted… me.

And I was the one who’d left him.
Not for a week.
Not for a month.
For more than a year.
Barely a message unless I had to send one.
Always avoiding him.
Always making excuses.

Maybe he was clumsy and stubborn and too intense, but he was also my dad. And he wanted his daughter back, not some admission that he’d called everything correctly.

Realising that made my chest hurt in a way the counsellors never managed to explain.

Going back still meant swallowing my pride. It meant admitting that maybe I’d been running from more than just him. It meant stepping away from a version of myself I’d built out of theory and anger and the need to be independent at all costs.

But staying where I was felt impossible.
The “peace” I’d created without him was cracking like thin ice.
The nightmares were getting louder.
Every path I followed ran me straight into the same wall.

Something had to shift. Even if that shift scared me.

That night, I stood at the clinic window, forehead pressed lightly against the cold glass. Outside, the world looked blurry and far away. In the distance, in the direction I’d tried so hard not to look, a light flicked on in a house I knew by heart.

I felt my throat tighten.

“Daddy…”
The word came out like an accident, barely louder than a breath.
Like a secret I wasn’t ready to admit even to myself.

But it didn’t sting this time.
It didn’t make me feel small or controlled or judged.

For the first time in what felt like forever, his name didn’t taste like bitterness.
It tasted like the possibility of going home.