Note/content warning: Memories live in the body. This piece is a reflection on waking up too soon, holding too much, and reconciling with what it all means. It’s a little messy. There’s mention of childhood trauma and domestic violence. Feel free to skip it if today isn’t the day.
Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — I woke up very young.
I don’t mean the cute kind of “wise beyond your years” awakening. I mean the kind where you open your eyes too early and can’t get them to close again. Like an alarm going off on the one morning you were supposed to sleep in, and you can’t ignore it. It’s a kind of awareness that doesn’t belong to children, but still finds its way to some of us.
I don’t know exactly when it started. Maybe 18 months old, but possibly earlier. I have vivid memories from that time. High definition. I can’t talk about them. The person I shared that time with gets hurt when I bring it up. Most people I know can’t remember anything before kindergarten, and their confusion at why I can remember, bothers me. I already feel so fucking out of place.
I’m trying to understand something simple…
Why have I never felt good?
Adults used to joke, “Just wait till you’re older, everything starts to hurt.” But I was already in pain. Not metaphorically, but physically (also metaphorically lol). Back pain. Legs. Wrists. Arms. Migraines. Everything, everywhere, hurting all at once.
I was called a hypochondriac. Chronically fatigued. I’ve avoided sleep studies for years because I’m afraid they’ll confirm what I feel. Rest doesn’t belong to me.
Recently, during a medical massage, a memory tore through me. It came without warning. It was sudden, raw, and unexpected.
It wasn’t a forgotten memory but it came to me from a new perspective. I don’t know if I can explain it but it wasn’t in my mind. It was in my body.
I started crying on the table.
My mind tried to catch up. The details developed behind my closed eyes like an old photograph.
The therapist unknowingly found a pressure point where this memory was living, woven into my muscles, hidden in plain sight. And without him knowing, I began to unweave it. Breathing through it and hoping he didn’t notice.
I saw her. Little-girl-me. Tinkerbell, as one of my great aunts called me, which made my little heart hope I could fly one day too. She was frozen in a moment. Stuck in a glass jar.
I stared at her in awe. I opened the lid and told her she was safe. I told her she didn’t have to stay in this jar anymore.
And then I let her go.
It hit me that I don’t know how to process some of the horrors I’ve seen as an adult. But I’ve been asking this little girl inside me to “get over” the things she had to witness as if she wasn’t already carrying more than her share.
There’s a scream that replays in my head. Over and over. I remember the burn in my throat from crying until I went hoarse. Sometimes I wonder what that kind of crying did to my body? Did the convulsions lock something in place? Was every breakdown its own kind of spell, sealing me into a jar forever?
How do I get the pain out? Am I stuck here for good? Trapped in a moment I never want to return to but can’t seem to leave?
Okay, things weren’t perfect. Even in the middle of all I saw as a child — I had audacity.
I wasn’t easily humbled. I was insecure as hell and a little arrogant. Convinced I’d be famous. A singer, an actress, a witch with actual powers. I’d be blonde. Blue-eyed. Porcelain skin (white instead of my light brown). I believed I could become someone more worthy of the attention I craved.
I had this unshakable confidence… tangled up with brutal self-loathing, from as early as I can remember. I thought I was the fastest kid in school, even with a green sixth place ribbon pinned to my chest at the track meet.
I literally could not and cannot run. My body’s so wrecked I get shin splints from walking. But in my head? Track star. Future Olympian. I was definitely climbing Everest someday.
Meanwhile, the universe kept forcing me into stillness.
Not letting me run far or long…definitely not letting me outrun my history.
If reincarnation is real, one of my soul’s missions is to learn humility.
Not the kind that shrinks you, but the kind that aligns you. That roots you without erasing what you want from life.
I’ve been told to be humble about everything. About how I look, how I learn, how I post on social media, how I breathe etc. I thought I was humble but I was just insecure until…
Enter Life, stage right. Life has humbled the hell out of me, but I still have to work at it. I have to constantly check my intentions. I still want to be seen. That never went away. I used to love the stage. I love theater. I like the way it tries to tell the truth and that’s what I want to do. Life did some things that made me slink into the shadows but that’s why I am here. In this space where I get to speak without apology and without shame. It’s a little stage I built myself. I think that’s okay.
There’s a tension I’m always holding: between confidence and pride. Humility and shame. I’ve had porous boundaries in the name of understanding. I overshare sometimes, like I’m trying to beat people to the punch. “Excuse me, before you decide I’m too much, let me explain.”
Sometimes I wonder if I would have been a worse person without the trauma that filled me with so much shame and fear. Did the pain save me from myself? If my baseline is as arrogant as I remember her, I’m probably less of a menace carrying all of this with me. I do appreciate some of it though. My arrogance/confidence made me try. It kept me afloat. I wasn’t the smartest in class, but I thought I should be. So I worked. I wasn’t the kindest, but I wanted to be. So I smiled when I didn’t feel like it. I kept trying.
I don’t think my mental architecture was designed to remember this much.
I think waking up too early fractured something in me. My memories spill out, and sometimes I lose the ones I actually want and need. My mind is always sweeping itself, trying to make space.
If memories are time capsules that let us travel then part of me is forever eating fried chicken at the Chinese buffet. Another part is still screaming in the living room, watching my mother turn blue in the face while her first husband choked her.
All of me is trying to get out of this glass jar and find home.
<3 hs