Meeting the Little Girl in me
I’ve got lots of little nagging health problems, and although I have an amazing health clinic with wonderful practitioners all helping me, I’m just not doing the thing. In this case, the taking care of myself thing. And I need to know why, so I can stop hurting.
With the help of Havi and Selma’s Destuckification Station and Emergency Calming Techniques, I’ve been trying to find some stuck I could talk to, or at least look at and talk about. It’s harder than it sounds. I found a bunch of different bits of stuckness in me, characters I could talk to but none of them were very cooperative.
The first one I’ve found is the Little Girl.
Sometimes she’s me at about 10 when I was all elbows and knees, the tallest girl in my class even at two years younger than everyone else. Sometimes younger, but then she looks more like my sister for some reason.
The Little Girl is very scared of everything. She doesn’t want anyone to look at us, to notice that we’re weird and different and sort of broken. She won’t answer me at all, not in words. But I can see her peeking out from behind things, and when I ask what she wants, sometimes I remember the answer.
The Little Girl wants to be like everyone else, wants to be normal and pretty and be able to do what they do. But she’s terrified, afraid to be seen by the other kids. If I do anything to seek help for the health issues, or work on them where people can see, then they will know. They will know she’s weak, and fragile, and can’t run fast without falling down or wheezing. They’ll throw things at her, and call her names, and the teacher will send her to the library at recess so she doesn’t get hit anymore.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the park with my poodle, and after we walked around and got worn out, we sat under a tree. The poodle sniffed around for squirrels (the ancestral enemy of the miniature poodle) and in that perfect moment the Little Girl came out. We picked up leaves and sticks and seed pods, and made patterns and designs all around us under the tree, and thought about nothing at all. I remember playing this way, all alone in a corner of the playground, hiding from the other kids.
Little Girl made a thing out of seedpods and sticks
I started to drive home but Little Girl wanted to go to the beach, and stand in the waves and feel the water pushing her back and forth. The poodle and I were tired, and the poodle had never been to the beach, but the Little Girl dragged us there without grown-up me realizing it until we were going the wrong way on the freeway.
I thought maybe the Little Girl was onto something. The poodle is fascinated by the lake we go to, and the streams that flow into it. It was sunset on a warm day, and we went to the beach where dogs can run around off-leash.
Not so great, actually.
Turns out that even on a warm day, sunset on a beach is sort of cold, and windy. Without a bathing suit, there was no option of going in the water even if it wasn’t freezing. We were both tired (me and the poodle, not Little Girl) and my feet were aching. We’d already gone to the off-leash area at the park, and since the poodle is not at all social with other dogs she was not really liking the idea of even more dogs trying to sniff her butt. I took off my shoes, and walked into the soft white sand - which actually felt kind of nice on my feet. Poodle did not agree, and followed me dejectedly out to the edge of the water.
Poor poodle. The sand was hard to walk in, since she was sinking almost to her knees with every step. She was not prepared for the water to come running up and grab her feet, or for the big shaggy dog that came running to say hello. It was like the Red Bull, herding all the unicorns into the sea. I had to pick her up because she started barking like crazy, and trudge back to the car.
Little Girl was gone. I think she stayed at the beach.