The neighborhood children my age (7,8,9,10) played together: either active, physical games outdoors or games of dolls-and-house indoors. I, on the other hand, spent much of my childhood alone. I'd curl up in a fan-back chair in our living room reading fairytales and myths, fantasizing, writing poems or stories and drawing pictures. When I wasn't in the gold chair, I was in the children's section of the public library sitting and reading in the fairytale, myths and legends section. On rare occasions, I'd be on the front stoop stairs at our apartment building playing school with the younger children in our building (and always being the teacher).
Sometime around the fourth grade, my “big” (often critical, judgmental) Grandma, who'd been visiting with us said to me, “What's wrong with you! Why don't the other children want to play with you?” I remember being startled and confused by her question. I'd never been particularly interested in playing with the other children. It hadn't, till then, occurred to me to think that that was either odd or something wrong with/about me. Nor had it occurred to me to think that they didn't “want to play with” me. I don't remember ever even thinking about how I spent my time at all: I just did what I pleased, enjoying myself-mostly with myself.
My grandmother's comment triggered a season in my life of moving from “inside” to “outside” eyes, of beginning to look questioningly at my place among my peers. My first conscious memory of feeling different was in the fourth grade. At the wardrobe, listening to classmates joking, chattering and laughing with each other, I realized I hadn't a clue about what was so funny or of how to participate in their easy chatter. They seemed to live in a universe about which I knew nothing at all.
In the years of my feeling uneasy about my way of being, I would sometimes try to
pass, to act like others of my cohort. It was incredibly difficult. By trying to be other than how I was, I was off-centered, unmoored from my own foundation. And, I had no inner compass to guide me into their sort of normalcy. I felt confused and disoriented.
The seeming impossibility for me to pass as normal left me with no choice but to follow my own meandering path. I turned back to my inner world: reading books, writing, daydreaming and, in the summers at rented bungalows in the Catskill Mountains of New York, creating fantasies in the woods. My inwardness, introspection and reflection grew me in ways that continued to move me further and further away from the world of my age peers.
After the loss-of-innocence about my way of being, I found that, by judging the ways of my peers as inferior to my own, I could regain a feeling of okay-ness about my choices. It wasn't until years later that I was able to give up the inferior-superior frame and still feel okay about my own different ways of being. (See the Judging Difference Monthly Musing Archives for more of that part of the story.)
Over the years of growing into adulthood, I was gradually able to learn to function somewhat more adequately in the world of interpersonal connections. I looked to find others with whom I could connect in a deep, intimate way. Inevitably, these would be people who were also introspective, reflective, with a decidedly inward focus.
The easy flow of casual social chat has remained forever beyond my reach (and, truly, beyond my interest, as well). Having more than one or two people in my home at one time, attending parties or social gatherings and participating in groups of any sort continue, for the most part, to seem unappealing prospects. Since any of these occasions require more effort, strain and stretching than I would choose for myself, I rarely consider any of them.
My joy and delight first in the voluptuousness of my solitude, my timeless drifting and second, in the lushness of sharing deeply and intimately with just one person at a time-have been at the center of my life all of my life. It doesn't seem to matter whether this way of being comes from my damage-my unhealed woundedness-or from my wholeness. It's just what's so for me. The longer I live, the more at peace I come to be with this different way that I am. I notice that as I've grown more accepting about this aspect of me, others in my life seem to struggle less with it. Friends no longer try to coax or cajole me into group gatherings. Instead, they call to tell me of their celebrations-to-be “so that you can be here with us in spirit.”
Directly naming how I am, without defense, apology or justification seems, in fact, to work as well with just about anyone with whom I deal. Over and over again, as I take the risk of just being myself, of simply and directly speaking what's so for me-as if I believe it's perfectly okay with me to be as I am-people seem to get it. If they criticize at all, my willingness to say, in response, that this is just how I am (rather than to defend or to counter-argue) usually ends the discussion.
Choosing to see our way of being as okay with us (since it's the only way we seem able to be in the moment), allows us to discover an incredible truth. When we accept and feel okay about how we are, there is no Velcro on us to attract others' judgments about how we are.
Consider letting yourself just be exactly as you are, right now-as if it's okay with you to be your very own unfinished work-in-progress self.
Be really gentle with yourself,
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.
Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!
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