I woke up in the early hours this morning, too early to start my day but just far enough into my sleep cycle that I had a rough time getting back to sleep. And, because the mind works in strange ways, an old memory from fifth grade bubbled up from the depths and filled me with shame. Which, as I lay there in the cool darkness, seemed strange to me because it wasn't shameful at the time. Let me explain.
When I was a wee 9 year old growing up in Alaska some 20+ years ago, I attended a small elementary school with maybe 150 other students. I was a bit (okay, a LOT) weird by comparison -- in fact, I regularly had lunch in the library because other kids would throw food at me if I ate in the cafeteria. I talked to trees and birds (I wish I could say this was some spiritual kinship thing, but the reality is that I had no friends and was too young/oblivious to feel bad about it, and just talked to the trees, birds, ants, bees, dandelions...) and had no shame or embarrassment about any of it. I didn't hate the other kids or feel left out in any way -- they just didn't like me, so I did other things.
But that's not the memory that haunted me in the early morning hours. No, we had an assembly in the school gym and I was seated in the front row with other members of my class. At a certain point in the presentation, the teacher presenting gave a rousing speech about school spirit, started playing music and beckoned the front row to come up and dance. I joined them because I loved dancing and didn't think about the fact that the whole stinkin' school was watching, because I just wanted to dance! So we danced and leaped around and when it was all over, we sat back down.
Seems fairly innocent, no?
Ah, but she wasn't beckoning to the front row. She was beckoning forth the eight aspiring cheerleaders to come up and perform their rehearsed school spirit dance. I was just the dumb weird girl who jumped up and joined them in uncoordinated flailing that didn't match their dance. The roaring laughter of my peers didn't even register, because I'd interpreted it as general school spirit noise.
It wasn't until I was taunted in the hallway that I realized what'd happened, and I sort of filed it away in my fearless, undaunted child-brain as a Thing That Happened. It wasn't until years later that the shame really started to sink in, when adolescence starts to kick in and you start caring about the opinions of your peers.
As an adult lying in her bed at 4am, I cringed and desperately tried to think of something else. The memory refused to budge.
Somewhere in the depths of my sleepy mind came a quiet thought that questioned why I was so embarrassed about what had happened. Not the usual "that happened two decades ago, let it go already" that I usually thought, but an odd understanding that I was judging my child-self for something she took no shame in, that I was deciding that her expression of joy and desire to move to the music is somehow embarrassing because it wasn't done at the right time in the right place. For all my soul-searching work and lessons in acceptance, I was still looking at this fierce little girl fearlessly living her life and wishing she would be smaller and quieter somehow when I should be lifting her up and admiring her bravery.
My child-self was not afraid. She lived her truth and talked to the bees, would spend afternoons in fields of giant dandelions singing to herself and watching the ants marching through the grass. She didn't care about the grass stains or the kids laughing as they rode their bikes past her and called her names. She didn't even register them as things she should pay attention to. They weren't interesting, so she honestly didn't care. There was no need to pass judgment one way or another. It simply didn't matter.
Once these thoughts overrode my crippling sense of shame, I gave my inner child-self a hug and thanked her. I have so much more to learn from her and I've been pushing her away for far too long.
I was able to sleep again, and dreamed of dandelions.
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