The Second Self

Unraveling the tightly knotted, zipped up, padlocked self that is underneath the labels.

When I say I spent years searching for answers, I’m not kidding.

I don’t know when I first began to realise that something wasn’t right because I was so young when I took it on board that I was defective, inadequate, incompetent, useless, stupid and other helpful labels - that I blamed myself.

Why else would the people who were raising me constantly find so much fault with what I was doing?

Why was I easily lead? Contrary? lazy? difficult? I didn’t mean to be those things. I wasn’t trying to be a problem, so I presumed that there was something inherently wrong with me.

There are labels for some of the situations that I was in as a child, one of them being Hyperlexia - just because I could read at the age of two - and taught myself apparently - did not make me a genius. Much to everyone’s disappointment.

ARFID is something that I came to relatively recently - that particular lightbulb could’ve saved me a lifetime of eating disorders.

RSD Rejection sensitivity dysphoria is really a thing. I’ve since found records of situations which affected me massively. I didn’t get over them for years, if ever. It turns out the people who ‘did’ those things had absolutely no idea, it never occurred to them I might be upset about it.

I found a photo of me in my room aged about 16. You can see I’ve painted my walls. I remember squeezing out all my oil paints and painting with my hands. Took forever to dry. It is a tiny room and I had to air it for ages. I didn’t care at the time though.

Now I am unraveling the tightly knotted, zipped up, padlocked self that is underneath the labels.

This isn’t a place for me to lament the life I could’ve had. I’m trying to explain how creativity and art brought me to where I am now.

I wonder whether me at preschool playgroup refusing to paint actual pictures - and instead creating abstracts - was me trying to express my emotions in a way that I couldn’t do with words, which is something I still do now.

I wonder whether my dislike of eating was substituted by me drawing multiple food stuffs from our kitchen - when still at primary school.

I wonder whether the landscapes and the drawings of buildings were pleasing to me because of the geometry, the symmetry, and the structure. Some escapism involved in there too. I’ve always been interested in buildings and have always had recurring dreams about them too.

So when I talk about the first thing that actually helped me, I don’t know what that is. Maybe it was the finger painting. Maybe it was the pleasure I found in things that rhymed and the rhythm and the pattern of poetry. Escaping into, not just reading, but writing, fiction. When I wrote my first novel (which is still unpublished but I am considering putting it on KDP) it was a revelation - I would sit at the computer and literally kind of compartmentalise my brain and be in the story and it was wonderful. I don’t feel as though I’m responsible for having written that story because it kind of wrote itself.

But I clearly remember the first thing that actually helped at the beginning of this discovery journey that I have come to this point with. Twelve years ago when my son was asleep and my daughter was at nursery.

I went to my studio, took some canvases, and just painted what I felt and then stitched them, embellished them. Interestingly this is the same process - and I didn’t connect at the time - to the first set of paintings I made and sold when I was fresh out of university. Abstract paintings embellished with shiny sparkly things and this process I noticed regulated my nervous system, and although that wasn’t how I noticed at the time, it just became a ‘this feels better this act this process is going to be the thing that saves me and I want to find out why’.

I am experiencing my past in snapshots. I have a choice. Keep quiet and fester internally. Or give an account of what it is actually like to live fifty years pretending to be okay and not doing that great a job of it. Then to find out that it is okay because actually I am defective - sorry impaired.

So I was right all along really.

I’ve been thinking where can I write down these snapshots of my life which illustrate how it was? It is new territory. Which is scary. Then I realised I have a paywall. Here:

TW: SH/ED