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. I’d picture myself filling out forms in some nameless government office, the fluorescent lights humming overhead, the pen shaking slightly in my fingers as if erasing a name could erase a childhood.

My generation had a great many places to hide from the love of unwanted parents. We hid in noisy cafés filled with idle chatter and indie music, in dim bedrooms lit only by phone screens, in train stations where you could pretend you were going somewhere meaningful. There were a host of distractions to fill my time, a load 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, people who hovered under streetlamps at 2 a.m. or curled up on graffiti-marked benches, 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 remember the day: standing in the hallway of our house, the air stale, boxes half-packed, Mum’s perfume lingering like a goodbye she hadn’t spoken yet. 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. He’d laugh too loud, suck in his tummy too often, trying way too hard. The kind of laugh that screams, “I’m still desirable, okay?” I remember thinking, as I stood beside a rack of discount candles, he’s too old for that. He shouldn’t be moving on just because Mum didn’t want him anymore.

Psychology felt like the only light I had left. I read textbooks like other girls binge romance novels. I’d sit cross-legged on my bedroom floor, surrounded by pages covered in post it notes, dusty sunlight slanting across the carpet. 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, thin white reminders on my skin that the darkness had teeth.

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, antiseptic and something metallic beneath it. It felt sterile in the deepest possible sense. The waiting-room chairs were shiny green plastic, the kind that stuck to bare legs. The walls looked dirty even though they were white, tinged with the shadows of years of fluorescent lighting. 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 in my narrow clinic bed, sheets twisted around my legs, convinced there was something wrong not just inside me, but in the whole system I’d put my trust in.

Dad only came once.

He arrived wearing a coat still dusted with rain, hair flattened from the weather. 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. We stood under the harsh hallway light, shadows splitting across his face, and 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 didn’t even want to understand each other.

When I told him I was choosing Mum, his jaw literally dropped. He stared at me like I’d spoken in another language. 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. The corridor smelled of stale coffee and floor cleaner. 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. Her new apartment was small, thin carpets, she kept it as clean as a hospital was, she was as broken as I was but that was a reason for a shared warmth also. It took forever to admit the truth: that the counsellors were not helping me. Not in any deep way.

It all fell apart on some random Tuesday. The counselling room was chilly, the radiator clicking like it had a heartbeat of its own. 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 drooping in the corner and the posters telling me to stay positive. A dust mote floated slowly through the air like even it was tired.

“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?”

“Healing is a process, Sophie. It takes time.”

An image came unbidden of my father rolling his eyes. I couldn’t argue with Dr. Hayden the way he could, dismantling her presuppositions and conceptual frameworks, mocking her humanism and moral relativism like he had the last time he’d seen me with her. But something shifted in me anyway. A strange, silent victory. Her words suddenly seemed thin, like tissue paper trying to hold back a storm.

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

She furrowed her brow, crossed her legs, and scratched her head. The chair creaked beneath her. “It might be resistant depression. Some people don’t respond well to cognitive frameworks.”

I laughed, but it sounded wrong even to me. It echoed strangely in the small office. “You don’t know why I’m like this, do you?”

She blinked slowly. “I wouldn’t put it like that, these things are complicated, Sophie, and it requires effort to work them through.”

“But it’s the truth.”

And watching her face tighten, I finally saw it: she’s brainwashed by her own discipline but she does not really know what she’s doing. They all are. They’re guessing about mysteries too deep to articulate and too wonderful to comprehend. A phrase my father once spoke to me fitted the moment perfectly.

I left the session hugging myself because no one else was there to do it. The hallway outside felt colder than it should have. 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 another shade of grey in the dark.

And then it clicked: the “health problems” I kept trying to get validated, the dizziness, the fainting, 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’d sit on my bed at night, streetlight glow spilling through the blinds, and whisper half-prayers that felt like they evaporated in the air. 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, usually at night, lying on Mum’s sofa under a knitted blanket that smelled faintly of old lavender, 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. Realizing that made my chest hurt in a way the counsellors never managed to explain.

Going back 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. I was sorry that I had allowed my pride to control me like this but even as I thought that, the pride seemed to lose its grip on me. It was like a hand with claws, slipping into shadows. It no longer had the strength to hold me down in my dark pit of despair, and my heart floated free.

Staying where I was now felt impossible. The “peace” I’d created without God 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 my window, forehead pressed lightly against the cold glass. The pane fogged slightly with each breath. Outside, the world looked blurry and far away, streetlights casting yellow halos on the wet pavement, the distant hum of traffic like a heartbeat. And 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.

My throat tightened. I turned to prayer. I said the Lord's Prayer that my father had taught me, starting hesitantly, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…” But that was as far as I got before the tears came. I slid down to sit on the carpet, back against the cold wall, shaking, sobbing from the core of my being. It took several minutes before the storm inside me eased enough to finish the prayer.

As I whispered Amen, a peace came upon me. It felt like stepping into a sunlit glade in a dark forest, where a gentle breeze blows the shadows away and birdsong softens the air. I could almost feel the warmth on my skin.

“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. I wasn’t feeling sorry or guilty so much as hopeful and unburdened. My problem was not sin from which I needed to repent; it was wounds I simply needed to let God heal. My daddy was not a perfect man, but I could pray with him, and maybe together we could find a way back to something real and lasting.

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