Hi. My name is Melissa and I would like to welcome you into my story. A story not to uncommon in its challenges, but is less common for its for its story of rising. It is not my own doing that is my successes. It is it is the property of everyone and it is only my job to share my journey.
Some people said that I was a special child. Focusing on talents that were intriguing and pleasant. I was always in the talent show, playing piano, and my artwork won awards at contests.
I do not have any words to explain the difficulty, but I do have the wisdom to see that it was beyond my control. You see, the ways of the world have effects on us all. We all feel it differently, that is part of our gift to the world, each and every one of us. The trouble is, that the world most of us live in is not entirely natural. People benefit from services and merchandise and they do not know how to deal with any negative effects on them and their children. It's not naturally human psyche to have to comprehend psychological effects that are not part of our natural feelings.
I now know the everything is the natural response to something. However uncomfortable I felt when I was a child and a tween and a teenager, it was all the best feeling for that moment.
Welcome. I hope you enjoy my story.
When I was a little child, I wanted to know all about how I came into the world, like all children do. I wanted to hear stories of when I was a littler child, and remember, and reflect on what it meant to be a "baby." My parents were first time parents when they had me, and my dad was always taking videos. Each week there seemed to be something new I would do, or some new version if it, and my mom and my dad were both very excited as was I clearly, as all babies are very satisfied by new manuvers. I was very sensitive to being watched and analyzed, however, as now I see most children are.
As I got older, I became more sensitive, and I loved animals. Mom mom took me into roll around in a stroller at a local educational farm where I could be next to the pigs and the horses. I wrote ooems about love, about animals that were metaphors to how I felt or different conditions of life.
My mother played the piano, and I started banging on single notes and the double notes when she played and also when she didn't play. Then she showed me Mary Had A Little Lamb this I jabbed at the piano over and over. Then it was Prayer A Jauka and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I liked dancing to classical music as a baby before bed, and so the flow of music as a descriptor of feelings or things was like a fact of life for me. I got better at the piano by practicing the chords my mom showed me and seeing how I could create a mood or a story by changing their combinations.
By the time we changed houses when I was eight, I have memories of the groups that my parents were part of at the Unitarian Universalist church coming over and I would play the piano for them. This gave me great joy. Some of the greatest joy I had was a game that I had that someone named something animate, like a rain storm or an animal doing something, and I tried to eminate it on the piano. My favorite to eminate were thunder storms or a predator catching its prey. I was most fascinated by this energy, the predator catching prey and the purpose of the circle of life. It was not because I was into killing or eating animals myself. It was because I felt connected to the animals that were so strong and hunted other animals. I felt connected to the process of decomposition, and it was this relationship in nature that I wanted to understand and see as a higher level. I wanted other people to understand them too. In my music, and in my energy, my thoughts, I wanted people to understand how our emotions are similar to these flows in nature.
When I was a little girl, I liked to dance. I liked fairy tales, I liked babies, and I liked nature. My mum was a psychologist, and my dad was a computer scientist. They did extensive research before having me. They wanted to be the best parents. In fact, they went to workshops, in order to be parents.
My mum and dad met at a unitarian church shortly after divorcing previous spouses they met when they were much younger. They both got to know each other as two of the younger adults going to the church in their twenties. My dad liked windsurfing, and was a PhD candidate, and my mum was a world traveller. They both were seeking a spiritual place that was more open minded then the one they grew up with. They were welcomed in by the older church goers, and my dad started doing yoga at the time.
My mum started experiencing high blood pressure towards the end of the pregnancy, and it was known that I had a knot in my umbilical cord, and I had stopped growing. I was scheduled for a certain time, and my mother began taking labour inducing drugs. Within a short time, I was born, is my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck three times, and my pretty face smiling joy, relief, and gratitude.
I had a pretty little smile that grew into a more broad smile in the next couple of months. What I remember of those days is my stuffed zebra, and the hazy confusion swinging nonsensical toys. Other company where's very overwhelming as well as loud noises. I would dance every night to classical music and it would allow me to go to sleep. I liked to dance alone, at two, and had a baby cassette tape player.
When I was three, I started doing ballet. I like ballet until they made us we're too many itchy clothes. After about a year two I quit, making an explanation for myself that it wasn't for me, but I still admired the children in kindergarten who did ballet. Dancing was an important part for me, it was an expert exploration and an explanation for feelings in the human consciousness. As a child, I knew all of the feelings including ones I had never combined or felt before, were mine. I knew everybody's emotions were mine. I cared about it deeply. And I scribed poems about love and how all beings on earth are connected to us, to my mum.
Going to the church was definitely an important experience for me. We had services about the solstice, about water, and about being human. We had songs that still make my heart sing today. Songs called Spirit of Life and Life Calls Us On. The other woman and the other parents in that community were my village. The minister, who was also a Zen Monk, and the other people who work there, we're respectable to me.
It was school that was most stressful to me. I considered myself a good friend, and the other quirks that my parents may have been worried about, didn't worry me. Like all kids, life was life and it happened at a fast speed.
I played a game called "baby bird." It was my invention. I played it for my mother, "with her." I squirmed around under the covers. After a voracious effort, I emerged from the covers. "baby bird is born!" I or my mother would say. I would be so happy!
In kindergarten, I was not concerned for myself, but was wildly concerned about what was going on. I spent a lot of the time quietly observing, sometimes at a distance from the other children. I did not understand that this was a concern, but I did find school quite stressful. It was not to much to say that school was too much enough to make my eyes stare, my body crouch, my voice lost, and only my mind left to feel my truth and think about everything.
When I was four, I remember my grandmother asking me how it felt to be four. I said "It is better to be three." Shocked, she said, "why is that, Melissa?" I said, " because when you are three there is less hard things for you to think about."
It was my grandmother who reminded me about how stressful school was the early years of elementary school. She told me that on multiple occasions, the school had called my parents to let them know that I was having a rough day, and they would like someone to come to relieve them from me, and me from them. My grandmother was informed and sent to pick me up, and on entering the classroom, the teacher told her that I was not in the classroom and she did not know where I had gone.
My grandmother found me, sitting under a bush, quietly. She said my classmates were very mean to me. I don't remember that. I don't remember sitting under a bush and I don't remember how my classmates exausted me.
In first and second grade, the perturbation of being told that I was wrong and needed to be changed began to haunt me. My behavior was sometimes criticized, and the way I a was talked to even by my family made me angry because it made me feel ugly.
It was partially because amidst my quietness and my feeling of the importance of everything, I began to need fidgeting to numb my senses. The sense that I needed to move made my legs move, or my feet, or my hips. They got me a bouncy chair, so that I could bounce back and fourth while sitting. And they gave me these squishy things that I could squeeze on.
The feeling was that I needed them, at least while I was at school. If I didn't satisfy this feeling, I would have a burning sensation, a horrible sensation, that would go deeper into my tissues and leave me with a lost and hurt feeling if I did not release it in some way. It was like a volcanic eruption. Trying to pause a volcanic eruption would take a lot of pressure and be very unnatural. It would also do nothing to relieve the pressure coming from underneath the volcano. While one might argue that pausing a volcano might help save people, like in my case, pausing it would do nothing to stop the presence of a volcano. So the inevitable was to quickly wiggle one limb, or two, or occupy my attention with something as an obvious distraction.
You can see many children, young adults, and even older adults moving their limbs involuntarily, I tried to control the whereabouts of it, and as equally as I knew it was not respectable act, I tried to avoid this, mentally. As a child who wants to be gold to their parents and be that way in the community too, to be plagued by some feeling, and to fall into some extreme of some category like this is a juxtaposition within oneself.
Such a juxtaposition is impossible to comprehend as a child. Maybe it is not comprehendable for anybody. I do not think, in all the world, anybody has ever gotten this juxtaposition. Because it is not a pleasant juxtaposition, and because it does not make any sense. The half that does make sense is the half that a child wants to be golden. The half that doesn't make sense is that a child feels things that no one wants to look at or talk about.
And then the child wants to understand or reason with what is going on. I did, and trying to come up with a moral reason for something unnatural is always hurtful and confusing. As fast as the bouncy chair showed up, and an obvious difference between me and most everybody else showed up, the rationalization of this was part of the pressure. The pain of this is not explainable, it is only definable by empathy. This moral, perceptive pain is mixed in with my memory, attached to any scenario and almost like a humiliation that was an inevitable part of making some release based behavior.
It being humiliating to release showed almost a clear message of our society. And I don't mean "our" society per se, but the way things are going; the direction which is promoted by whoever is directing "our society." If it has to be humiliation to release the stress or pressure of something hurtful or wrong, that means that whatever is hurtful or wrong is being justified. I think a lot of children go through this, even if it is just a part of their natural sense of purpose, or something they feel, or a curiosity about a way of life, is discoraged by their parents.
Usually, it is just something about someone, that is discouraged by their parents. In modern days, there is a new level, or maybe it is the same old level, at a new magnitude. It is not just the part about someone that is discouraged, it is the way in which discomfort is expressed that is discouraged.
Some people do change course in a way that was inspired by their children. I can think of a few examples. My mother, after I loved classes with clay and began taking it seriously and clearly looking forward to it, my mother started doing it to. She became a professional potter, and gets a great amount of satisfaction. She would say that she always had an artist side, and she is more than happy to achieve the use of this in a serious way, because it seems she is breaking out of expectations.
I do think it is that what people are afraid of is seeing that any harm came out of something that they did as parents. While the whys of this parent destroyer is not made clear in our society, the truth is fairly discernable. Parents may give their kid the same foods that they at as a child, but those foods today have toxins in them that are not really part of the food. So the parent may give the child something, which could be anything at all, and because they have good intentions and are dealing with whatever is available, the notion that there is something unnatural or wrong in what they are doing is a moral crime, a sin. It is a crime of the unseen force that poisoned the object which the parent looks at well- intentioned. That crime is so awful, and it is so awful because it deals cards in an area of humanity that wants to function only knowing joy and love. That's why it is so hard to comprehend, and challenging, and ravages unseen by our society.
I think that when parents become self-conscious, their fear is derived from a deep responsibility as parent, and that they remember the intentions of what they did. When they remember the intentions of what they did, there are certain things that may be involved, like chemicals or poor digestiblity of the food, that have nothing to do with the intentions of the parent. So when problems are occurring as a result of these things that had nothing to do with the intentions of the parent, that seem not included and at odds with their memory of their intentions, its no wonder that this has little explanation within just the realm of family dynamics, morals, or human emotions. Its beyond the navigatble territory of morals and emotions just within the family members because the issue or the stressor is introduced by others, or inforseen by the parents.
I really would like to emphasize the importance when say this because these issues that are now surfacing in people are expressing as issues because they are not on the domain of love. There are thing on the earth that are not on the domain of earth and love. The human response to those things is chaotic, but human emotions are able to precive everything in proper order. It is just that while one is under the influence of any object outside the domain of love, one is literally under the influence of it. On the level precievable to their body, to their conciousness, to other creatures, and to everything around them, they have made the decision or choice to decide there is some meaning or usefulness to something that is outside the domain of love. makes them so sensitive to the idea that they may have done something wrong.
Most people do not have the emotional space in their bodies, from all the stresses, to deeply feel all levels of the situation and wind up with compassion for themself and then the unweighted space to change course if that's what their child is signaling. I think that if people are stressed by the same stressors their children are reacting too, they will have no space in themselves to be anything other then emotionally attached and take any criticisms personally when it comes to why their child might be hurt by unseen poisons or by the indegestibility of foods. That's because the adult literally feels the presence of these compounds in their body, and confuses them with him or her self. Therefore they get all confused when someone tries to talk to them about the physical nature of their child's reactions, and they take it personally instead of taking action themself reflecting on the information for themself.
It's difficult when most people are under the influence of something difficult, and when in our society most people have decided for themselves, or so they think, that some harm has to be accepted. This influences the music that is popular, the energy of people and projects and ideas. After all, if you choose something, you are likely to get behind it, listen to the music or the stories or opinions that can't escape from it, which is what you can relate to.
This influences the music that is popular, the energy of people and projects and ideas. After all, if you choose something, you are likely to get behind it or identify it being inevitable, by listening to the music or the stories or opinions that can't escape from it.
There are a lot of songs in modern pop culture that are about not being able to escape, or about feeling ashamed or down. All ages can recognize that this has arisen, and everyone may be in some way asking themselves, where? Or why? Many people are hurting, and they may look to why and try to look into darkness to point to a person, and event, a concept, or anything in their lives. Just as any young or old man or woman might think about their origins and the origins of why they experience whatever unpleasantness.
I think that people automatically feel that the unpleasantness is dealt to them. They feel it and they don't know to take a stand and decide for themselves, like a dog trained to meekness, that assumes whatever is given to it must be for some higher purpose.
People do not realize that physical suffering is not part of life, it is part of death. It's death that people are mourning, going through emotion pain. And as they have no sight of simple and easy, they are arguing about philosophies, trying to find a way to justify the experience as necessary for their development.
People want to believe that their parents are good, and that everything that is in some way justified. Likewise, if you believe in God or a Creator, you may see that instinctively you want to believe that everything you are given, supposedly by God, is good. When it appears not to be this way, there is a sense of inner conversation that implies conflict, maybe a sense of betrayal, or confusion.
So elementary school passed by relatively painfully. Each day was marked with teachers yelling at the class, being excluded at recess, having my head hurt at the pressure of the school tasks, and being talked to slowly in an annoying fashion that made me think I was extra special and yet made everything more painful and took me farther away from me classmates, as they could see what was going on. Classes for communication, where the challenged kids went to learn artificial rules about conversations, were grueling and trained our conversations to be more fake and calculated. It made our minds believe we had to work against our own grain in order to be a normal presentable human being.
All of this added up in a slow, but volumous, knot. The plan screwed a nail in me that turned with the anxiety and sensations that filled my body with fidgeting and emotional turbilence. It was not really something I though about, but because I was malleable like any kid, the clear messages were not erased, only forged and supported by my elders and I had nothing else to believe about my place in the unnatural. It was only nature that I went to even as a very small child, to see that clarity and open love for me. A calm was in nature that had more rules that made sense, versus the people which made me mad. The green grass and the squirrels, the spiders, and the blowing air, had nothing but mystic analogy to all parts of my soul. They held my pain, they held my appreciation for them. They heard all my thoughts, back then, which are more like nature when they are still connected and naive.
It was in middle school that self awareness came in to make everything like hell. It was the fact that I was so sensitive, so perceptive, that I would shake in class and almost pass out from not breathing. It it wasn't for the aid that sat in the edge of the room to watch me, I would have lasted no more than a day before all that I was holding in became an avalanche of chaotic sound and movement, making me erupt a sage of non-verbal, emotional grievances.
This only happened a few times. But long before the day was half over, I would be extra pale in the face, frozen, barely breathing and staring like some horror was in front of me. My aide would make the movement I was supposed to make to signal that I needed to take a break from class, and she would make noises to get my attention. After a few times, if I didn't respond, she would get concerned and walk over and ask if I was okay. Sometimes "go," she would say, "just go," and she'd gesture at the door until I'd walk stiffly over and make a limp attempt at opening the door. I slid out into the hallway and walked like a glass statue over to the room where I could go without the lights on or anyone around to see my grief.
I was lucky that the teachers trusted me enough to let me be alone. It was our arrangement that I insisted I needed to be able to go alone or else I would not get relief.
I went to the dark windowless room that had been made for me out of a closet. No one else had a room like this, as far as I knew, and it was just mine. I was painted blue but all of this didn't matter when I was in it alone. The lights were off and the props were the pillows and the chair legs. The tables and chairs were a frustrating part of the structure if class and school. I threw myself on the pillows in the dark and wrung my hangs on the chair legs. I ground my torso into the floor, then retreated on the soft pillows. I wished they were bigger than I realized I could not relax here as I would be looked for. I moaned in frustration and tried to release as loudly as no one would hear, and as aggressively as I was so frustrated and aggrieved by everything. They shouldn't know how frustrating it is, they shouldn't hear the sounds like a morning mother. I let them have my sweetness and hid the frustration from them because I did not want them to have to think it had anything to do with them. So I hid frustratingly, in my mind was turmoil, and no one to talk to, not even a psychologist or friend who would talk to me about how the situation was so painful in a way that could really understand. Instead, there was a raging fire of desire in the psychologists and the adults, that wanted to see all the special accommodations as part of a heroism that contrasted my own specialness. This shallow whitewash haunted me leaving me lonely and with tears frozen and my mind always throbbing and searching for reason.
My parents noticed me come home everyday frozen and more and more stressed. They noticed the slow change in energy I had for talking, for homework, for life. I wasn't sleeping well and I went through an hour of lucid nightmares before falling into a high stress sleep. It wasn't like any medication would help- it was clear that school was stressing me out more than was sustainable. My parents saw that now was the time to save me from the concrete high school of two thousand people, and they saw that 8th grade would be a better starting point as my anxiety at school was signalling that I was trying way too hard to keep afloat and another year would be just too much.
They were lucky that they lived in a town that had money, and that they had a lawyer and connections who could work to get me a place in a private school. Rather, it would be an independent school, one that takes town money in addition to private money. The town was already spending money on the salary of an aide for me, and this was the work of the same lawyer and people who my parents would now use to argue that I needed a whole different school environment.
I was not sure if this was a good idea, my aide was great and I had relationship with them that might have been somewhat like a trauma based bond. I did not know if any school would be a better thing. My parents looked around on their own, at different schools. They most suspected one by the name of Corwin-Russell to match. There were only a few schools, and this one, they heard before, was for relatively independent, smart, children with unmet potential. The majority of the school was such children who were quirky, some were sensitive, and all had some mix of emotional, sensory, acaedemic, and social hypersensitivity.
My parents asked if I would like to visit, they encouraged me and must have been anxious for me to agree. Of course I agreed, though I did not expect anything. I was in survival mode, and expecting anything was not in my mindset.
I arrived at the school at the scheduled day, shy and quiet. When we walked in, nice people greeted me and a student was lying on a bench with an arm in the air, a position that would not be supported by most, and I relaxed a little bit. There were a few other students visiting that day, and by the end of the day I felt like I was in a oasis that must not exist.
Because I don't remember much of a change in hopefulness after my school visit, I do think it was in the end of the year.
If it was or wasn't, my only mental effort was dedicated towards how would I tell my teachers that I was leaving them and would I miss them and would they think about me. How could it be better and what of my teachers was what I worried about my new school. I do not know if I thought I deserved it. But deeper in, the story was bigger, I was going to a new school with a nick name of "Broccoli Hall" and I was looking forward to it. My narrative was l "I am going to a good new school. I don't think I should go to the giant high school. I am going a year early out of the public schools. I don't know if I was ashamed of having to leave the public schools, of being too special, or of not being good enough to make it in the middle school where I felt like I should suffer with everybody else.
My seventh grade year was marked with high acaedemic scores and high stress. I wore large sized t-shirts with animals or environmental messages on them. I held onto my love of farming and nature to be a house for my dignity, and with my acaedemic effort and my calming demeanor I held myself high. Keeping as much dignity my eclectic sensitive nervous truth took as much effort as to render me but a spirit with strings attached to my body. People seemed to respect me, giving me space. It was only occasionally someone had to talk to me for a class project, and that usually meant I was some kind of savant, not listened to because I was some kind of savant, or talked to like I was a child. Inevitably, when I was talked to like a child, I became meek and sick feeling, which made more reason for the person to talk to me like a child. I shriveled at this, and absolutely lost my words and my thoughts l at once.
As far as what people thought of me, I was sure that based on the fact that I had an aide, they would think I was different in some way. As clear as the situation was, this was a question I grappled with myself. I was different, as far as the clear picture seemed to be cut, and the way it was cut or painted was not feeling great. It left me like a cripple, dealing with thoughts of what it meant to be a cripple, when all I should have been dealing with was the awareness that it was all to get through a hellishly designed day in school, and then another.
I only later, ten years or more, visited a school to talk about my experience in middle school. The children were part of a group for children who were bullied or on the edge in some way. There were not any children with aides, as the group was more focused on racism and sexism. They listened and then expressed that they were happy to hear from me, after I expressed that I wondered what people thought of me then, and I didn't know anymore if people even thought what I was afraid they would think. They said they did not know what to think, or how to interact with people in a situation like I was in. Sure enough, that's what I had felt and what had been so torturous for me.
I asked if the people in the school who had special attention seemed distant or preoccupied with themself, or to be rough in a way to assume other people judged them. Sure enough, the students said that was true. They thanked me for my conversation, and I was thankful to them for their conversation and felt like they had done more for me than I had for them. Their conversation solidified something in me that settled in a number of years.
The Corwn Russell school was a wonderful school run by an older English woman, her husband the head art teacher, and a number of other seasoned teachers who were the vision of the school. The school was also named Broccoli Hall, because a big helping every day is good.
Steve welcomed us that first day. Only the new comers were there to ease in the day before the official first day. A new families picnic had been had earlier, and there were new faces over again in the circle who Steve was gently talking to.
I looked over at Anna, the equally sensitive and equally animal oriented one of the cohort, who seemed more nervous than me. I knew something about the fear of falling into the place where school may become totally exasperating, and the serious face with tired eyes and a brightly colored bandana looked like it was used to seeing threats of the same kind over and over. I had my own concoction of threats I anticipated and feared over and over, and wirh Anna I felt a sense of kinship and importance, of me to her, and of her to me.
Jaw almost chattering and hands stiff, Anna also looked enthralled and relieved. I also was probably wide eyed and with my hands curled into my abdomen and my head turning, but the fear was mingled with a sense of relief, like I was sitting in a cloud of relaxation I had never felt, since its magnitude was its contrast to the pain I had anticipated every day at school.
The guaze of fear, the surfacing waves were flowing as amazement of the kindness of Steve's welcoming session hummed over the fear of new experiences. Young and older kids were sitting in a close semi-circle around Steve, one of the main elders of the school, as one of the teachers who had been there from the beginning. He gently described the school, feeling and talking to each one of us as if we were each precious gems and our all different nervous flinchings was not the point. He calmly introduced the school schedule, groups, school year overview, exetera.
At Corwin-Russell, I crashed. All of the energy I had been holding in to my own detriment now l released to my own benefit.
Eighth grade probably would have been worse than seventh. In some ways it certainly was. I was so moody that I would pace back and fourth in class along a certain shelf,and hide under certain tables. Everyone either knew I was under the table, or would not have been surprised, so it was hiding from the chaos of the classroom, of opened eyes, of the overwhelming movement of enerything that seemed like I was supposed to face. I was drowning each energy beckoning me with my own self-created vibrations or silence, depending on my level of overwhelm. These vibrations were the same ones that I tried to make in the short, crunched time I had to safely release the pressure in the closet of the public school. The release was allowed to be in the moment at Corein-Russell school, and so I wallowed in my own feelings at Corwin-Russell, going deeper into the depths of each corridor of what I precieved.
I wrote many poems in eighth grade, and one of them stands out in how it captures what I have been aware of from the beginning, and in a sense, it is my gift of perception that others recognize but I must learn to use as compassion instead of misery. But at this time, and as a general rule, my perception that is captured in this poem is miserable and like hell or worse.
"I'm caged in a raging sea.
It follows me, dancing at me
like hell dressed up in a princess gown.
It laughs at me, dancing round,
and staggers around my feet,
holding high like a current around my legs
and swirling 'round my waist with pride, until, laughing at me, it swirls around again
and chokes my throat-
I look around, wondering
What really is in this sea?"
That was the epitome of my poem writing efforts, the one that said it all. I got the most joy out of it, knowing that I had put into words a phenomenon I saw and felt. Just like what the metaphor of the poem points to, people do not obviously want to see or light up something that is in itself hellish.
A lot of what I did back then was to endure. There were the moments of quiet outward expression of where my joy was really lively inside, or my powerful recognition of natural systems was working in joy and intelligence. Those were moments at the farm camp, or outside in nature by myself. Moments that were with anyone else were contorted by fear of needing to conform or being a certain unexplainable way of being different. Everyone knew that I rationalized a this sense I had about how I am different in a certian way, and that's just the way it is. They tried to convey that I ought to open up to being less governed by this. They said that even if what is is, and I really am weak in some ways, why use that to limit myself? Try as they did, it only very slowly worked.
This backdrop hung over me like a shadowy void between whether it was okay, or not, to be me. The eyes of my childhood, my parents, must have wanted me to be okay and successful. Afraid of not providing the right place for there kid, or even more wondering why they had a child that did not follow the rope, it was their love and the stress of getting on in the world that was just too dang stressful to have to enjoy life sometimes and then other times be so overwhelmed that I wanted to take a deep, real break from life, which is a horrible feeling that I wish few of you readers know.