*adult's note: This post has been revised for spelling and some grammatical mistakes, but most of the word order was kept as it was written for the sake of preserving an accurate picture of this little one's experiences. *
We live. We learn. Sometimes, we learn things that we were never meant to learn.
That happened to me. My name is Jenifer. I was born when we were in third grade. I was born to take on fear about school work when nobody else could handle it.
I was always scared that I would get it wrong and make other people angry. I thought I made people angry because they didn’t say anything when I was stuck on something, like a question for a math test or a hard spelling word. I didn’t ask them when they were quiet like that because thinking about asking them made me more scared that maybe they really were angry at me for not knowing the answer. Sometimes they sounded angry, but then later they said they weren’t, so I showed myself how to not trust what my ears were telling me and I made sure I did that all the time to everyone and everything and everywhere. I did that because otherwise I think I would have lost everything in my head from being scared all the time.
When I would get scared from people not saying anything, my words would go away. No matter what I did, I couldn’t make them come back. When my words would go away, I would go away too. That wasn’t something I showed myself how to do. It just happened.
But I did show myself how to turn into two people. To turn into two people, three things had to happen. The first thing that had to happen is, I would suddenly know that my words weren’t going to come back because of how scared I was. The second thing that had to happen is, I would feel like I had to somehow tell people around me that something was wrong, and I would have to do that by doing something nobody thought I would do. The third thing that had to happen is, I would remember how I was just blind, and how people who were just blind didn’t do those things.
When those three things happened, I turned into two people. One was me, and the other person was someone who was blind too, but they also were like some of the kids we saw on the outside who had other things going on. That meant they could do the thing nobody thought we would do, and I would be ok, because I wasn’t the one doing it, they were. I knew we had the same body on the outside, and I know Cooperland had his unity thing up when I did it, but now that that’s all gone, I can remember what really happened back then. That’s why I can tell you this story like I just did.
I remember how I used to think about turning into two people before the unity thing went away. I just thought I was pushing parts of me out of the way of other ones. But now I know what was really going on. I used to do it a lot. When I would lose my words because I was scared, and the person who was helping me didn’t ask what was going on, turning into two people felt a lot safer than having to do something the grown ups weren’t watching out for on my own.
When the other person did whatever it was they could think of, sometimes the person helping with school work would say, “Let’s go for a walk.
But I didn’t want to go for a walk. I just wanted help with the work. I knew better than to say no though, even though I was angry after they would say that.
After they said that more than once, I had a weird thought. I thought, being angry makes you blow up, but being scared makes you tiny, so I can’t be both. Then I remembered how boys always were the ones to blow up like that and how girls always were the ones to get scared, and I pictured myself as a boy. It looked so funny!
I pretended I was him every time people helping me with school work wanted me to walk in the hallway because I got scared and let other insiders do something they weren’t watching out for. I would feel better about saying no when I did it that way. One day, he came out of me like the other kids who had other things going on did before. On that day, the person helping me with school work wanted me to walk down the hallway like they had before, and I started to be him again, and then everything felt funny like dreams feel. It felt like I was him and not me anymore, then I found out how I was right next to him, and how he was in the spot I used to be in.
The unity thing Cooperland used to have used to make me think I was just angry and not scared. I used to just ignore the dreaming feeling when the boy and me would switch places and I thought, well, I’m angry, and feeling like a boy is normal when I’m angry. I just thought I was making things up when he stepped in front of me for the first time.
He kept helping me after the first day, and I was happy about that. But I kept being the one out for school work when we got scared doing it. I got tired of that after a while, so I thought, hey, if I made a boy for feeling angry, then I can make another girl to help me with being scared.
I did the same thing I did to make the boy, but only for math stuff, because math scared me the most. I didn’t know I was doing it the right way until the day when she came out of me like he did before. When that happened, I began to picture teaching the boy to do the same thing I was doing. Later I learned how, when I did that, I was getting into our inner world and teaching him for real.
That made me really happy. I was so happy, I wanted to be a teacher when I was all done with school. I never thought I would get stuck in time like I did. I thought, I’ll get out of third grade, and then I’ll be ok, and I won’t be scared when school was happening anymore. But I was wrong about that.
I kept being scared, even though I didn’t really want to feel like that. It got so bad I started pretending again, only instead of pretending I was a boy, I pretended there were a lot of other girls around me who were as old as me. They helped me and the other girl who was there for math stuff, because they took the extra scared feelings we couldn’t feel ourselves. I showed them how to do everything I did to make insiders, so that way they knew how to turn into two people and how to pretend to be someone else until the other person was next to them.
I used to think I was just making things up, like I did with the boy, because the unity thing was still happening. But I loved thinking about how I was teaching like that, because it helped me not be scared about the next time I had to do school stuff. When early school stopped, I went to sleep for a while, but not all the way. Someone still had to handle the scared feelings we had, so an older me was born. She wants to talk for a bit, and since my part of the story is done, I’m going to let her in the next post.