Because it's a simple way to explain the way my brain has worked for over 2 decades.
I love coco pops. I think they have been my favourite breakfast cereal all my life.
I'm happily sharing this fact with you, because it's the truth.
BUT.
What did you have for breakfast? And do I look you enough to change my answer.
For a long time, my mentality and personality was completely shaped around people pleasing, the ability to bend and shape who I am, true or false, to any given situation, friendship circle, work environment, family friends. Whoever, wherever, I was 101 different versions of Fran. None of them 100% real, all of them with flickers of honesty, quickly snuffed out by lies.
I have a void. An empty space. A need.
To have people like me, love me and let me love them and do whatever I can to make their lives easier, happier, when in reality, it ends up the complete opposite.
I have come to see this, all be it, a little too late in life, that lasting relationships cannot be built on lies. False hoods and fabrications are not stable structures to create love, friendship, memories, because it's always tainted.
But, for a long time, with a little girls behaviour trapped in an angry teenagers body, long term never really mattered, it was in the moment, it was rose tinted happiness, it was enough.
It's only in the past few years that I've come to realise that what I really want, and wanted, all my life, was meaning, was honesty, friends, family, love.
And all the while, I was making each aspect impossible.
The coco pops theory.
Prospective friend "I love Weetabix, I had Weetabix for my breakfast this morning, I think they are my favourite breakfast cereal? - What did you have Fran?"
Me (knowing I had coco pops and love coco pops more than any other cereal, acknowledges that this new person prefers Weetabix and that if I want that person to like me and find a common ground quickly the right answer is as follows)
"I had Weetabix too, they are also my favourite cereal"
Thats the simplified version of what goes on in my head.
These days as I grow to understand myself, who I am, what I want, it's easy to answer that question.
I had coco pops. Or I didnt have breakfast because I was baking bread.
And more than that, I don't really care if you don't like coco pops - I do and thats all that matters.
In 2014, I wrote a message to a lady who I thought might be my last ever foster carer.
Last night she read it, replied to it, and was indeed the lady I hope she was.
Now, I had foster carers from hell. An old lady called Aggie who I will never ever forget. She was a horror, Especially for a little girl who had been torn from her soul mater, her little brother.
And then we were reunited, at a farm, with lovely, kind people.
The reason I wanted to find this woman was to ask her : what was I like?
I'm fascinated, tracing my life, my behaviour, my decisions, the cause and effect, in some hopeless endeavour to put it all right, to put me right.
I want to know, was I this broken when I was with them at the young age of 3?
Was I kind, was I hurtful, was I upset by all that had happened?
Did I miss it? Was I needy? Did I lie? Did I cry?
Living the life of a compulsive liar, it often becomes blurred. Was it real? Or was it something I made up?
I second guess myself, I trace backwards evaluating what was right and what was wrong.
I worry that the memories I have are not real, that its imagination, that its my version, twisted in my own head.
I remember so much. From so young. Its too much in one mind.
This woman, had me at the age of 3, she gave me my first ever birthday cake. It was small, white fondant icing, with a red number 3 on it, and a small fondant teddy bear, with one candle.
It was magical.
I had never had a birthday cake before and hadn't understood the fuss of a day of the year having meaning. Not Christmas, not Easter, not birthdays.
I felt special. I felt loved.
I was adopted, birthdays got bigger and better, but nothing compared to that first cake.
I grew older, images, names, places. voices, memories, all floating around in my head.
Some I was fond of, I drifted back in time and stayed there a while, some horrific, that falling asleep, I'd be trapped there for a night and wake up confused, disgusted, ashamed.
I thought there was something wrong with me, to dream such things, to think it real, that it happened.
And lo' 25 years old, reading a court case file ready to be sentenced for fraud and there it all was in black and white, the stories, the images, the places, the names.
Not imagination.
Fact.
It was sickening and reassuring all at once.
So, to get to the point.
I messaged this woman, she wrote back, and I asked her one of the burning questions in my mind, which given all thats happened in my life may sound trivial, but I had to know.
While I was in foster care, was there a horse and a donkey, one called Dusty, and one called Frosty, and was there a field, with a broken chair, green, that spun round, that we would play on for hours on end.
I've grown up thinking it was escapism, fantasy and that no 3 year old could remember such things, let alone hold onto them until the age of 29.
...
The speech bubble appears on Facebook, what will she say...
"you're so right about it all, we had lots of horses, and we did have Dusty and Frosty............"
So I'm not mad. It wasn't a dream.
The good and the bad, it all happened.
So what do I do now?
