The Journey Inward

As a kid, I felt deeply. I thought deeply. I was observant. Vigilant. I was curious and mystified by others. I felt unlike anyone around me. I was imperfectly perfect, but didn’t know it or feel it. I felt separate, isolated.

Recently I had the experience of feeling fearful when attending a reunion with some friends from my childhood. The unease and anxiety followed me for weeks after, too. It seemed that I gleaned new understandings of what was going on within me in small leaps forward. Each realization brought me to a new depth.

But this weekend, standing alone in the rain on the sidelines of my daughter’s soccer game, new thoughts came to me that revealed not just greater self awareness, but also recognition of lifelong patterns.

What I realized was that I was giving my childhood friends authority over me, giving them the power of validation. I was believing that their idea or version or story of me as a child had to be the truth and that truth had more power than my own experienced, lived truth. I was believing that their 40 year recall of events that happened when we were 10, 13, 16 years old were accurate, that as child spectators they knew better.

At that reunion, I feared exposure. I feared being seen. I feared being misunderstood. I feared being judged. I feared.

I decided that I most likely wouldn’t attend again next year. I wasn’t close with these people anymore, they didn’t know me now, and they were quite possibly out to get me.

And then grace kicked in and I remembered they were just children then. They couldn’t possibly understand the shared and unshared experiences we had from my perspective any more than I could understand how they felt, what they needed, how they hurt. We were children. Because we hadn’t stayed close, we didn’t have the opportunity to flesh out those times, to hear and be heard, see and be seen. We didn’t grow and learn and evolve together. We were frozen in time.

So grace became my first answer and boundaries became my second. My story is my lived experience, with all its accuracies, misperceptions, feelings, hurt and trauma. No one knows what it was like for me. They couldn’t. Surely if they did, nothing callous would come from their mouths now. Regardless, boundaries empower me to advocate for myself, to speak up for myself, to honor that little girl who needed a protector, a caretaker. Boundaries might sound like, “That actually was a very difficulty time for me, and I don’t like to talk about it,” or “That’s not how I experienced that time,” or “I’m sure I might have seemed that way to you at the time, but that was far from how I felt.” From there, I could share as much or as little as I like. If my boundaries are crossed, I can withdraw knowing I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

And so that leads me to my last realization. Grown up situations that mimic my childhood leave me feeling helpless. And in my helplessness, I withdraw. I drop out, fall away. I judge and criticize before I can be judged and criticized. I am scared. Boundaries empower me and allow me to stay in until there is true and just cause to leave. This response is not fear based. It is not self protective. It is open and trusting and expecting the best.

Photo: Pittsburgh, August 29, 2023. By LA