Me, at Eleven

This girl, I’m looking at her. I recognize her in a way: I remember seeing this picture of myself throughout the years since it was taken, so I remember that it’s a picture of me, and I can figure out that I must have been around eleven years old. But I also don’t recognize her in a way: I feel I should know her but I don’t. I look at her and wonder, where is she now? Who is she? Is she still in me somewhere? Still a part of me? I can see why I’ve been drawn to looking at old pictures, of myself, of my family, and trying to connect with who I was then. Telling you about this girl I was, it helps me remember and know myself. Thank you for listening.

I remember this — you notice how I look, the clothes I’m wearing and how my hair is styled, and I realize that I remember picking out the blue and white checked shirt, cotton, button-down, long sleeves. I remember trying it on with the cable sweater over the top. I remember I liked how it looked to have the collar corners pulled out over the top, but I was worried about the color. The shirt was white and the sweater just slightly off-white. But I loved the shirt and I loved the sweater. It was one of those sweaters that just fits right and feels good. So I asked my mom, does this match? The whites are different. She was a little mystified by the question I think, but said yes, it’s fine. They match. I must have also asked her to braid my hair. I don’t remember that specifically, but she braided my hair many mornings back then before I cut my hair short.

My hair was long then because I was a dancer and dancers were supposed to have long hair pulled up in a bun. That girl in the picture, she was a dancer. I remember that. I went to dance class every week, maybe twice a week by that time. I loved the difficult and demanding work of striving for beauty. I could see the ideal in my head, how my leg would move, how I would hold my arms, how I would hold my head the way I had been taught to do, as if I had long earrings and didn’t want them to touch my shoulders. I could see that ideal in my head and I could see myself in the floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall mirrors of the dance studio. I could see how the two, ideal and reality, didn’t match but that I could get close. I could see that the more I practiced the closer I could get, but that I couldn’t control it either. I couldn’t make my body match what was in my head, I could only work hard and keep trying. Over the coming years it became something I would continually reach for but could never seem to grasp. How long does a girl live like that before something in her shifts, changing her sense of herself in the world, what she’s capable of, what the world is like?

I remember one day after leaving class in tears, inconsolable in falling short of the ideal. My brother didn’t understand why I kept doing something that made me so sad and frustrated. I couldn’t explain it to him then. I don’t think I even understood the question. I danced because it’s what I did, what I wanted. There wasn’t really a reason why or even a decision in my mind. It was just what I did.

This girl and her heart, that is what I am seeing now in the picture. She was wide open, not discriminating to whom her heart was available. She was like a book on a shelf, there for anyone to pick up and flip through, put back on the shelf or sit down and find out more. There were times of wariness of course, of holding back after someone was careless or mean. Many years later there was a marriage that almost closed off her heart for good. That’s a story for a different time. For now I am thinking about how my heart feels wide open again today, like it did for this girl. It’s different now because I have something to compare it to. I have also felt my heart with doors locked and bolted. Walls of steel. This openness now, it’s so different from how I felt before, it’s like I’ve been drugged. I feel rushes going through my body that make me stop and wonder — what is this feeling? What’s happening to me? This feeling and this wonder compels me to revisit the past.

I look back to try to glimpse my future. If I can see what happened, see where I was and where I went, maybe I can see what might come next. What future I might create for myself. I also wonder…not just what happened, but what the heck I’m doing right now, opening myself up again. How is it that I have the guts to open up my heart after it was so bruised and battered? All that pain that was so intense I had to just close off, like cryogenic freezing to keep some essential part of me intact and protected while death went on around it. Death of hope, death of relationship. And now I can see too: death of old outmoded ways of thinking and being, death of the girl that tried so hard to please she walked right up to the line of giving her life for someone else’s supposed happiness. My intellect tries to understand it but it can’t by itself. I need to be whole in order to understand. I need my heart and my mind and my body to find each other and be friends again. Eleven girl you are my hope.

I return to the picture. She is so trusting. Someone could use the words innocent or naive, of course she was only eleven then. But carrying forward ten, twenty, thirty years I think I kept a lot of that. I don’t assume the worst about people. I take them at their word. I forgive and forgive again. I mistook letting people walk all over me for kindness and forgiveness — that one I put in past tense because dear God I hope that I’ve finally learned that difference. This girl didn’t know that difference and definitely got hurt by people who took advantage of that kind of trust. Something in me refused to give up that trust though. It seemed important and essential to hold onto or risk giving up on life.

So here she is, I found this girl inside me today. I didn’t realize it until now, but she has been inside me helping me figure out how to live in this world full of beauty and sin and hope and faith and pain and struggle. This girl and I both learned that I/we can have an open heart and also take care of myself. I’ve written before about a traumatic experience several years ago that split me up into fragments, and how the grace of my daughter’s presence saved me and brought me back to this life. It took several years from that shattering to get to the point where I was strong enough to walk away from the man whose presence in my life was so harmful it made me summon that catastrophe. Fast forward several years, and another catastrophe was looming. I saw it all so clearly one day, how a catastrophe was inevitable and inexorable, and at the same time it was completely avoidable if I summoned all my strength and courage and reached out for help. I was so worn down and exhausted at this point I didn’t have the strength to leave, but I did have the strength to reach out for help, and that help made me strong again, made me take steps I didn’t think were possible. Made me do things and say things that I didn’t think I could ever say or do. You see I had been convinced that I was trapped in this abusive relationship. I know I’m not alone in this experience. I truly didn’t think I could leave and still have a life afterwards. Now I’ve stepped into that after-life and here I am, feeling so happy and so free and so strong. Feeling safe in a way I hadn’t before, with an open heart and the self-knowledge to trust in myself to keep it safe even as I go out in the world again.

Back when I was eleven years old, still reaching for that ideal, still wanting to find in myself the beauty I saw the other dancers embody, I didn’t know there was another way of being. I didn’t know there was another kind of beauty that came from inside my own heart and didn’t depend on the perfect execution of certain choreography. It came from dancing because the music sounded so good in my ears, and my body felt so good moving to the rhythm, and my feet wanted to move and glide and feel themselves on the ground. It came when I realized I was free because I worked hard and made it happen. It came when I found I could be myself and still reach and strive, but reach and strive for some beauty inside myself rather than for something someone else said beauty was or demanded it be. I reached for what I knew must be inside me even though I couldn’t see it or understand it.

This girl is here now. I found her. I know her and I see her heart.