I have written a few posts about consoling my inner child. The girl who hid behind the scratchy brown chair in the farmhouse to avoid getting a patch on her bad eye.
I went back to Disney as an adult and rode on the carousel horse I was denied when I was 7 and did the whole trip the way I wanted to when I was little. It was bliss.
The 10 year old who disappeared into a basement, mouthful of lies about how she had actual friends at school and who was instead ridiculed for wanting to wear rainbows and just being weird in general. The little girl who was legally old enough to be left home alone and so she was.
Very alone. To the point when I finally found her, she had gone mute and feral.
Thought I worked through that, and mayhap I have.
But what about that long stretch between 13 and 19.
How do I make peace with that?
I did find some friends eventually. 3 of whom I talk to and 2 of whom I have spoken to in the last few days.
I forgot about the phenomenon that occurs when the moon and stars are aligned just so and there is a retrograde of epic proportions. This isn’t my recent past coming forward, this is ancient history. Dead sea scrolls and a language I forgot I even spoke. The kin, puck bunnies, Point Clark and strange street signs. Names forming faces that I wouldn’t recognize anymore because it’s been 30 years since I saw them.
I have gone home and it’s funny. I don’t look at the adults on the street to see if I recognize them, I always look at people who are the age now as I was when I left. Part of me is still trapped there.
I won an award for a collection of short stories I wrote in grade 7. Made it all the way to the national finals. The next year I was 1 of 4 students selected for a project that took me out of class for a few hours every day. I didn’t understand why I was chosen. But a few years back, I saw my grade 8 teacher and she made a point of not just remembering my name but fawning over me and called me one of her most favorites.
That was a bittersweet feeling. To be remembered was glorious, but what did I do with the potential she saw in me?
Not a fucking ting.
Cut to the first year of high school.
I walked in one way. Academic. Conformist. And terrified.
I had my grade 9 school pictures retaken, there was a weird shadow under my nose that looked like a bruise or a booger.
In the first one I was dressed in pink with what can only be described as a curly girl mullet.
That was September.
By November, when the photographer came back, I looked so much cooler. Oddly, when I think back, I would still wear that olive green sweater now. I had figured out minimal make up, grew my hair out to an asymmetrical bob and invested in some earrings that weren’t childish ladybugs or little butterflies.
I changed. I have proof.
I had been in a microcosm for all of public school, 30 of us, for the 6 years I was there, and there was really only the one aesthetic to choose from.
High school was a whole new overwhelming world full of goths, skaters, the preppy girls etc etc.
I was a hippy goth for the few years I was there.
None of that is neither here nor there.
What is vexing me is my perception of myself back then.
Dorky, shy, awkward, fairly friendless, never fit in with one group or another really. Mostly kept to myself.
And, utterly forgettable.
Not so apparently.
I told one of my oldest and dearest friends in the world about going back to school and what for. He nervous laughed and implied I was likely to be stalked and killed. Said I had a ‘compelling presence’. But we talked through it.
That’s another thing. I am still friends with some of the cool kids from school. Does that make me a cool kid by default somehow?
It’s been a fucked up week.
3 days ago I added another high school person to Facebook. We never spoke but I knew his sister and father and asked him to pass along a hello from me.
We ended up talking and I got an arcane glimpse into the past.
I thought of myself one way.
He remembered me at a party at the very end of high school, down to what I was wearing.
“Red shirt and jeans.”
I remember that party. Everyone I knew had graduated that year. I hadn’t. But it was a tiny reunion of the halls in grade 9, present and accounted for in a girl’s backyard. I remember thinking, as I looked around surveying the crowd, that I would probably never see these people again, and mostly I haven’t.
I remember seeing my little sister smoking a cigarette and being so pissed off. She hated me smoking, and she probably never had another one after that.
I ran away from home when I was 16. Tried to go back, left again, tried to go back left again and eventually I just never went back. Greg died and there was a great amount of chaos in the fallout and I finally left for good.
A week or two before, I went to watch a rugby game at school and got charged with trespassing by the principal. Then that party and then I vanished for good, for 20 years almost to the day of that game.
I didn’t belong there.
I truly believed everyone believed the rumors about me, perpetuated by the popular girls. That I was a slut and a witch, which oddly I did end up becoming after all.
I thought everyone saw what I saw which was a sad, awkward girl who never fit in anywhere and just floated aimlessly until I ended up floating away.
I still kinda think that way. But something is changing.
This man from high school, who I never spoke 2 words to, who hung out with people who intimidated the shit out of me also called me ‘queen’. Said they all found me very attractive and terribly mysterious.
He said, ‘you must know, people must tell you.’
And mayhap they have.
But I feel like one of the hosts in Westworld. On a loop with fragmented memories that don’t make sense and every time someone gives me a compliment I am somehow programmed to think “it doesn’t look like anything to me”.
It’s not just corrupt data, it is missing data also. I didn’t have all the information.
I am trying to repair my very fragmented self.
I recognize my inner small child and I have worked really hard to make sure she feels safe and heard. I am wrestling with my inner parent who loves to degrade and dismiss my inner child and I am trying to get a handle on being able to call my inner adult forward at will instead of just in crisis.
But what about teenage me?
I just wanted a bit of attention, some kind of genuine connection, someone to notice me and accept my weird. One person did, and he died in my arms a few days after he told me.
And apparently, others did too but I never knew.
Psychology talks a lot about honoring your inner child and healing original wounds that happen when we are little, things that affect us in ways it is difficult to define because it is the beginning of the nurture half of the nature/nurture sense of self. But what about awkward shy teenagers who never grow out of that phase.
I have a hard time accepting myself. And it isn’t necessarily due to traumatic events sustained in high school, although there were a few, it is more about my perception of myself that was formed then and isn’t necessarily wrong per say. How I saw myself was valid and still part of who I am. But because I barely talked to anyone, or formed any kind of solid bonds with anyone, never dated anyone, never really talked to a lot of people. I didn’t get an unbiased view of how I appeared to others, only what I thought of myself. Which was not a lot.
If the reports I have gotten over the years are true I was beautiful, mysterious, ethereal, graceful and above all intimidating.
Too intimidating for anyone to tell me what they thought of me when I needed it the most.
Still no time machines. So I will take these small tokens of niceties and being remembered as something much more than I could have ever imagined.
Am still wrestling with how to process all this. But I am grateful for these glimpses into my past from a fresh pair of eyes and not my own.
I think maybe I should try going home.