One of the things I've been doing on and off over the last several months (whenever I have a block of time to reflect back on my childhood, or whenever I think of something quick to jot down) is keeping a list of "losses" that I've experienced.
I have come to realize that I have a lot of difficulty allowing myself to feel any emotions deeply, or even acknowledge what emotions I have about something, because I have fallen into the habit of ignoring/avoiding/repressing these things instead. It's a common coping mechanism to get through a difficult situation, but not something (most psychologists agree) that should be continued indefinitely. If you can't deal with something at the time, it's okay to set it aside for later - but eventually, that "later" has to happen. And this is my "later."
So I've been going through and typing up a list of life experiences, focusing especially on the negative ones I suspect I never fully allowed myself to feel/mourn at the time, or in the subsequent years. Instead of acknowledging them and allowing myself to figure out how that experience made me feel and what (if anything) can be made of it, I've just been ignoring them, not thinking about them, or thinking about them in a minimizing or mocking manner. ("Oh that wasn't a big deal. It's not worth thinking back on now." "Oh, everything is fine; it's always been fine." "Ha ha, look at this embarrassing thing that happened to me - wasn't that stupid? Wasn't I a klutz?")
The purpose of this exercise then, is to NOT minimize or mock. I write down everything I think of - even something that seems silly, or irrelevant, or insignificant, or childish. I allow myself to remember the event and acknowledge that it happened to me. I want to get into the habit of allowing myself to feel frustrated or upset or embarrassed or angry if I need to. I want to get into the habit of acknowledging emotions instead of hiding them or trying to immediately change them into a different emotion. They don't have to be big things. They just have to be true.
I call it "grieving losses" - though it's not always grief, and it's not always technically a loss. Often, though, it is. The loss of childhood, the loss of what could have been, the loss of a grandparent, the loss of friendships, etc. Growing up is full of losses. It's a normal part of growing up - but just because it's "normal" doesn't mean that it's not significant to my life, and an important part of who I've grown up to be.
The more I started writing them down, the more I realized I had. I also started to see patterns - things that happened to me over and over. I won't share all of them here because there are too many of them (there are almost 50 pages of them by now, typed, and I've only covered my life through high school, not counting anything from the last decade) and because many of them are very personal and not something I want to share. But I do want to share some of them, in case you're interested to see what this looks like. I recommend doing this yourself, reflecting back through your own life and seeing what losses you might have that you never allowed yourself to fully grieve. Everybody has losses - it doesn't mean you had a "bad" life, or a "bad" childhood. It just means you're human.
Anyway, here are some of my "losses":
- Medical/physical losses, including broken bones and illnesses that temporarily impeded my ability to do things I wanted to do. For example, in seventh grade I fractured my wrist and had to wear a cast. I wasn't allowed to play on my basketball team while my wrist was in a cast. I also fractured a bone on three other occasions - when I was three and I jumped off a chair and fractured my foot, when I was in 4th grade and fractured my shoulder from slipping on some ice, and in 9th grade, when I fractured the same shoulder. In 4th and 9th grade, I had to wear a sling on my left arm. Anytime I had a sling or cast, there was also a sense of embarrassment, where everyone would demand to know what had happened and I felt I had no choice but to laugh it off like it was no big deal. Before other kids could laugh at me for being a klutz, I "headed them off at the pass" and laughed at myself.
- My grandfather, who I was very close to, passed away from cancer when I was in 2nd grade. There were obviously a lot of losses associated with that - not just the physical loss of him being gone from my life, but the loss of what could have been, which I still feel on occasion. How different would my life have been if he'd been around for more of it? On top of this, I felt that I wasn't mourning the way I was supposed to - because I never really felt the urge to cry about Grandpa's death, even though I knew I was supposed to be upset about it - and so I felt ashamed at my inability to cry.
- I really wanted to go to school when I was younger, and begged my parents to let me go. I was not old enough to start Kindergarten by the state standards, so the public schools wouldn't let me register. My parents took me to several private schools to take their entrance tests to see if any of them would let me start, even though I was a year too young. I passed the tests easily (I could already read and write on my own), and I started going to school. This doesn't seem like a loss - I got to do exactly what I wanted to do! - but upon further reflection, I think this is one things (out of many) that contributed early on to my senses of not being good enough, or not being taken seriously. From a young age, I felt I had to prove myself - to prove that I was smart enough and advanced enough, to prove that I belonged where I thought I belonged. School was a privilege, something I had to earn. I knew I was ready for school, my parents knew I was ready for school - but I had to convince other adults (and the kids who were a year older than I was) that I was capable. Furthermore, it wasn't enough that I be an average student - I was trying to prove myself, so I had to be even better than all the other kids were, so people would stop questioning whether or not I should be in that class. This continued through a lot of years of schooling. I had this constant need to show that I not only belonged in my grade (whatever grade I was in at the time), but that I was one of the best students in that grade, regardless of age. I worried that people thought I was too young. Even when I was obviously advanced in reading or other academic subjects, there were concerns that I was not "socially mature" enough for the grade I was in. My 5th grade teacher wanted to hold me back from starting middle school, and have me repeat 5th grade - not because I wasn't academically ready for middle school, but just because of how young I was (and how young I acted). There are other examples, too. Even though I always somehow got around these age-suggestions (by going to a private school for a couple years, by having my parents agree with me that I could handle middle school and should not be held back, etc.), the fact that these concerns kept coming up affected me. There was always a voice in the back of my head wondering if maybe those adults were right - maybe I didn't belong, maybe I wasn't good enough.
- I went to three different elementary schools - a private Christian school for K-1st grade, my local public school for 2nd-3rd grade, and a different public school for 4th-5th grade, to take advantage of their TAG (Talented and Gifted) program. Every time I changed schools, I had to leave old friends behind and learn how to make new friends. I learned to not take friendships or relationships for granted; I knew they were transient things that could easily be lost or altered by changes in circumstance.
- Similarly, having friends or neighbors I was close to move away, and losing friendships that way.
- Feeling that I didn't belong, in a variety of situations including church youth groups and cliques at school. This is something everyone struggles with to some extent, I know - but the commonality of it does not diminish how much it hurt at the time. For something so universal, growing up sure can be a lonely experience.
- Arguments with friends in middle school. In one case, this led to the loss of a friendship, which was never fully repaired. In another, it led my other friends to "force" the two of us to sign a peace treaty so that we would get along when we all hung out in groups. I understand where they were coming from (and if they wrote their own "grieving losses" lists, perhaps concerns over our prolonged argument would make the cut for stressful experiences in their own lives), but that does not negate the fact that I once again felt like I was not being taken seriously. The continued unity of our friend group was more important to them than validating my feelings, and I was talked into putting the argument behind me without any real resolution for it, simply because others wanted me to get over it.
- National tragedies, like the Columbine shooting and 9/11, both of which I became aware of and impacted me as a middle schooler.
- Having an appendectomy in seventh grade - which not only included the loss of a few days of school (including dress rehearsals for the play I was in), but also included another instance of me not being taken seriously. When I woke up in the middle of the night screaming and unable to move due to the pain in my stomach, the nurse that my mom called insisted that I was just experiencing my first ever bout of menstrual cramps, and that all I needed was a warm bath. When we went to the doctor's the next day, many doctors didn't believe that I could have appendicitis, because my descriptions of the pain I was experiencing were "too textbook" that they thought I had read a list of symptoms somewhere and was only reciting them, lying about what I was feeling in order to get out of school or something else I wanted to do (never mind that I never wanted to get out of school - I loved school!). Thankfully, they performed the surgery anyway, and I felt a lot better (physically) afterward.
- Several specific incidents of being teased (by family members, by adults, by other kids). I was especially attuned in middle school and high school to mean comments about my appearance or my weight, which I worried about (as many teenage girls do).
The list goes on, but for the sake of brevity, I'll end there. You get the idea.
By allowing myself (however belatedly) to recognize that these things were indeed losses of one sort or another, and by allowing myself to feel angry or upset about them, I am practicing changing my go-to habits. The hope is that, in the future, I will be less likely to let bad experiences, traumas, or even just the natural, small losses of growing up/being human simmer under the surface for years. I will acknowledge them as they come and allow myself to take the time necessary to 1) figure out what I am feeling about the event, and 2) actually feel that way.
It can be hard to be an adult if you are still stuck in your childhood - and you can't get "unstuck" from your childhood until you look back on it and figure out what things you've been carrying around all those years.
It's not a "quick fix" - just compiling the years of memories I've done so far has taken me months, completed in small pockets of time here and there when I have it - but I think it's something worth working on, which is why I've continued to add to it whenever I get the chance.
