I am my truest self as child, blue and green thoughts pervading every corner of my face, open and malleable to the power of emotion. The purple crocuses behind the badger hole, butter sandwiches, and ice skating on Harold’s Pond, all memories of a beautiful youth, are all lived in the moment mindfully, like a Zen Buddhist partaking in a Japanese tea ceremony. My four-year old mind runs simply, carefully greased and maintained at the edges, while the center runs free of judgment and calculations that the coming years will bring. But today I am no longer a child, and my being is emptied of self, naked and numb to all that passes through my skin.
Growing up meant a loss of friends, playdates, and people to sit with at lunch. I used to hate feeling lonely. I understood hurt, I felt hurt, I was hurt. Crying was a response rather than a ritual. Emotion and feeling were a part of me. But time and sadness synthesize into soulless living, which conjures a numbness of the brain. I could not live my life without soul, so I began to watch the lives of others. Observations and analyzations became intuition that I thought filled the space where my feelings, opinions, and sense of self used to be. I liked being able to read other people, judge them, and predict their thoughts and words. And so I was the critique, the reader, the viewer of my peers’ worlds, because I did not have a life of my own to be a part of. I did not realize that this behavior I had been partaking in for the past few years meant