#my four year old self

i’ve been thinking a lot about this little lady. how she lived, how she felt, what the world looked like through her eyes. rifling through my baby box and seeing what i’d written as a 4 or 5 year old, reading about how much i loved rainbows and animals and most of all, myself. it really is a novel thing to look back at your little self and read about how you thought you were so overwhelmingly intelligent that you could be anything as long as it was conceivable. [and i thought, how wonderful, most of us must find ourselves so smart before we are taught that intelligence can be measured and gauged, and that one is inherently better and more valuable than the other.] or how you were so overwhelmingly beautiful, so much so that you should have been a ballerina. [and i tried to recall any time i spent any time looking in the mirror as a little girl and thinking of myself as beautiful, and then realized that i must have inherently found myself beautiful as the only time i ever looked in the mirror was to make sure i was brushing my teeth correctly.] or how you thought you were wicked fast and athletic and could do whatever sport you wanted. [and all i could recall was the crippling anxiety i had in gym my whole life, wondering when it changed and what had happened to crush my inherent self certainty.]

i kept looking through my baby box and was in awe of the creative confidence i often used to complete my worksheets. fill in the blank exercises were clearly my absolute favorite; there was no answer too ridiculous to be excluded. my favorite answer was in a thanksgiving packet, discussing the life of pilgrims. when asked what pilgrims did before eating their thanksgiving dinner, my answer was:

bowling.

accompanied by the best drawing you have ever seen of a family of pilgrims going bowling.

no notes from the teacher were on this page. just my drawing and fill in the blank answer: bowling.

now i’m not even going to try to guess what my train of thought was leading up to this rather abnormal answer, but how amazing that i must have had some sort of a mental conversation about how if i were a pilgrim, what would be the best thing to do before dinner? and at some point i landed on the answer bowling. and with ecstatic certainty i filled in my answer and proceeded to draw a stunningly accurate portrayal of my family as pilgrims going bowling. honestly, how wonderful is that? but this quickly leads to an uncomfortable question: am i even capable of something like that right now? being able to turn off the logical, analytical, processing, systematic part of my brain to even answer that creatively? and not in a forced way, but genuinely??? simply contemplating this as i type makes me flat out grimace. this part of my brain is so hidden behind boxes and new software and processing systems that it feels like the equivalent to walking into walgreens and asking them if they can develop my film. “well, we still have the machine but it hasn’t been used in years… we’ll turn it on and see if it even works, so why don’t you come back tomorrow since it’ll probably take it a day to even start running again.” [this is a real conversation i had with a walgreens employee several years ago.]

how do we lose that magical sense of wonder? it feels like thick velvety fog; incandescent, evasive, yet bursting with mystery. but when we are young, it feels so familiar, like your favorite stuffed animal or the soft corner of your prized blanket.

i am on a search for wonder.

maybe magic.

but probably both.

“‘Finding yourself’ is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. ‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.”
Emily McDowell