You've known all along.
Old journals, photos and new learnings.
I keep three photos of my younger self in my office, me as a baby, me at about four years old, and me as a fourteen year old. I like the visual reminder of my younger self. The photos remind me to honor her often, to consider what she’s navigated, and ponder how she’d feel about me now. I like thinking about how my role as an adult devoted to my own healing is that I get to re-parent these young parts of myself.
I’m working on a project that is requiring me to deep dive into my old journals, which i’ve kept consistently since I was fifteen, and I what I notice is how quickly she minimises her big feelings, how much longing she has to feel seen, and how weird she felt most of the time. Looking back on these pages with the knowledge that I have of attachment styles, trauma and my own neurodivergence makes both embarrassment and compassion rise big. I want to protect her. I want to swoop in and let her know that she’s okay and enough and it’s the systems and rules that are flawed not her. I want her to know I see her, i’ve got her and that it’ll be okay.
I read this page this morning and it just blew me away a little bit. I wrote this when I was sixteen at the end of Grade eleven…
I want to be happy. I want to have fun - no matter what, and have no regrets. I really do believe my life will start after next year is over. I want success. I want to live my dreams. I want to write, direct, act and teach - that will be my life! I want to love and be loved. Things that I want: To be published. To be the lead in a big play. To get my license. To direct brilliant plays, including my own. To write amazing scripts for film, TV and the stage. I want to inspire people.
I knew in the pages of my journal exactly what I wanted, and now I’m living a version of that life. I knew. I really think part of the unravelling of the rules and cultural bullshit, the healing and learning of our stories and patterns, really just takes us back to the version that we came out being. That we are who we are all along, and our task is to come back to that. I picture it like with each rule we learn, each knock we take, each cultural or systematic learning we abide by, we add a jacket, or a layer, that takes us away from our true knowing self. I’m picturing myself waddling around like those clips of people who put every item of clothing they own on. Rendering us slow, and it’s hard to bend and change. But the older we get and the more unravelling that we do we get to shed these layers. We get to be free and unencumbered by the stuff that restricts us that isn’t ours…if we want to.
I want that feeling. Free and true. Exactly as I am.
There’s shit we learn when we’re younger and those stories really weave their way into our way of being in the world, and if we never question it we end up showing up with the capacity of our young selves. I’m thirty-nine but there’s still moments in my life where my fourteen year old self is in control. And I’m not okay with that. She must be fucking tired. She’s been on high-alert for so long. About a year ago I got real quiet and I pictured her and I meeting. I told her I appreciated her strength. That I believed her. I told her I recognised how hard she’d worked to keep us safe. I told her she didn’t need to do that anymore, that I’ve got her, I love her, and she’s safe to take a breath and go and watch Dawsons Creek. It was deeply moving.
These pictures in my office are reminders of all of the parts that want so many things. They’re all true and valid.
What do you need to say to your younger parts? What do they need to hear?
You know.
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What’s happening in Claire land…
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