When I Grow Up Part II: Forgetting How To Play!

In those days I ran around shoeless a lot! It was one of the few freedoms I knew!

I was a child…and children just needed to do what they’re told!

I grew up being plagued by these tenets!  They haunted me during recess  at school, on silent car rides home and times in between while I was busy forgetting how to play! They kept me up at night having imaginary conversations with my parents when I would be brave enough to tell them the truth.  Only in these fictional worlds were conversations like this possible!

And so, I learned to get comfortable in these worlds. I made homes there where I could rest and playgrounds where I could play and safe dark alcoves where I could hide.  When the light of day came, or when I could no longer find shelter in the security of a good book, I came unwillingly crashing back to my life!  It was a matter of survival in those days to not tell the truth!  Any number of “bad things” could happen to me if I offered dissent.  My mother was a tough sergeant and my father knew how to take orders!  I dared not reveal what I knew in my heart for fear of pain…the physical kind and the non-physical.  I could be disowned as a daughter…I could be told I was a waste of a life or that I perhaps that I did not deserve to be alive.  You probably figured out a while ago that these conversations had little place in imaginary possibilities.  The dangers were real and the risks too high.  Some days crying in bed, I couldn’t distinguish which was worse…the pain from my external wounds or the salt being rubbed into my internal wounds.

At some point in my life, I did tell the truth!  It was perhaps half way into high school.  The consequences   of this revelation were too painful! I am still nursing the hurts in therapy.  In the eyes of my parents, I became a lost cause. Inspiration does not visit lost causes.   One is just driven further into the darkness…and I ran there…in fact, I sprinted there…anywhere but here!

For the first 30 or so years of my life I taught myself to be second best and third best.  When I got A’s in school without too much effort, it was not my intelligence I recognized.  I had been taught well.  I looked instead at the A+’s that a few in my classes got. Those A+’s were the real marks of achievement!   It felt like I was in competition with these “others” over the years when really, how could I be “one of them” when I had already given myself a failing grade years ago!

I wandered briefly getting my parents hope up slightly at the prospect of becoming a lawyer.  A brief stint as in intern at a prominent law firm was enough to show me otherwise, and so again, I became a lost cause.  I ended up in Human Resources!

 What the hell is that?

It’s not something my parents wrote “back home” to their relatives about.  I doubt they even knew what I did.  Even being hired into one of the top consulting firms in the country was below passing grade!  And over time I came to realize that I had graduated in my learning to become my own worst examiner!

No amount of promotions and pay raises or recognition of any kind could convince me I was “a success” to any degree. The stamp on my forehead marked me as a failure…and I was not good enough! Life or the energy that surrounds it has a good sense of humour. It let me continue this internal monologue for many years without interfering.  I believe the callings from our soul is always there…but first it comes as whispers or perhaps we learnt to shut off our internal ears that only loud commands would ever be able to gather recognition.

I did hear the call eventually. It took the silent partner I call my body going on strike for me to pay attention!

To be continued in part III!

There is a candle in your heart,
ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul,
ready to be filled.
You feel it, don’t you?  (Rumi)

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. (Rumi)