how to change history
Over the past decade, the friends I kept, therapists I had, and materials I would read and listen to offered me a new way to speak to myself. This was something I studied all my life in my grandmother’s book, but somehow still didn’t get. Instead of speaking in the critical and pointed language of my mother, I learned to speak to myself like a child. I'd repeat coos like it’s okay, it’s okay and pick her up in my arms and stroke her hair, pressing my cheek against her head. I feel her weight and the ruffles of her clothing, the warmth of her body, the smell of a childhood sunscreen or shampoo. For a moment, I am there.
Instead of joining her in a memory, seeing through her eyes, reliving it through her, I stay as my adult self in my own adult shoes. I pick her up out of memories and we watch them together. We don’t talk much about what she is upset about, more that she just is upset. And isn’t that hard, isn’t that scary. We all get upset sometimes. Take deep breaths, deep breaths. Whoooooooo let it go. What’s over here? Is it a sunny day? Should we go look at that bird?
When I focus on the feeling in my body and when I externalize the emotion by imagining my child self feeling it, I can comfort her and it passes quite quickly. Sometimes I pluck that little girl right out of a memory when I see her tears well up, tears she cried alone or didn’t cry because she was alone.
Tonight as I was holding her and rocking her, my cheek against her blond hair, I thought about those moments in my room when I felt so alone I didn’t want to exist anymore. In those awful, dark moments, every now and then, an energy would float in. In those deep moments I would touch something ethereal I couldn’t explain. The inexplicable sense was that something, somewhere loved me, that someday it would be okay.
That feeling is me now.
When I go back in my memory in this way, when I have the courage to go in to the scariest of moments, I step back through time. I am that feeling that floats into the room, bringing comfort, a sense of something from beyond. I am the invisible hand that grabbed my own through time and space. The gossamer hand that stroked my back as I cried and the thought that whispered it’s okay, it’s okay, take a deep breath, you aren’t alone. The arms that would hold me, the chest I would lean in to, it was all mine all along!
Knowing this, knowing I can, right now, change history, I cannot wait to dive in to these awful memories. I want to go hang out in every one. I want to bring a whole fucking party of me. I want to love my memories out of existence and replace them with me having tea with me and me and me and me and we are just in there holding stuffed animals and tiny cups and laughing it up because here I am hanging out with this sweet, sweet kid and imagining my way into a completely different childhood where I will never have been alone in a damn room again.
Wow. What a thing. Those moments, those moments in life where you had the sense someone was there… there was. It was you.
Now, let’s go and do it on purpose.