“Help me, I’m screaming, and nobody can hear.” For years, every essay or short story I wrote ended with that sentence. I have always been trapped. My soul is too big for the space my body provides. Writing about why is going to take a lot of energy, some of which I hope I have the strength to find. I really want to write this story so that I can feel what I put down when pen hits paper. Typing wouldn’t cut it here – I do too much “chatting” on my computer for me to get at real emotion while looking at the screen. The fact that I type everything else makes this more meaningful anyway. Maybe not to you, but it’s my story and I want to enjoy it. I need meaningful. I’m writing on plain white bond while leaning on a Marie Claire magazine. I can’t lie this way, not even to myself.
Lying to myself is what this is all about really. I felt so much pain so young and didn’t know where to put it, so I found a convenient place. I have made the real and fantasy flip in my head so that the things which happen to me are supernatural, and the experiences I dream up have the more profound impact on me. What has always amazed me is that it’s not as if I don’t know which is real and which isn’t. It’s like when I put the clock twelve minutes ahead so as not to be late. It’s not that I don’t know I changed the clock, but somehow the time it tells seems more real than the time I know it is. That has been my life.
Where do I possibly start? There is no beginning. Most people start when they were born. Others start when they were conceived. I don’t start in either place. I start where my psyche begins – where the truth that I know and the life that I dreamed took hold. I begin not with the ticking of time, but with the past that is my present.
My mind’s first clear image is of the day my brother came home from the hospital. Every relative I knew, every adult I met, told me that this was my most exciting day. I don’t think I remember my brother’s arrival because it was exciting. I think I remember it because it was supposed to be exciting, and it wasn’t. My first clear image is of a day that disappointed me.
It was May, and everyone was sick. It was that stuffed up, how can warm weather make me want to sneeze so badly kind of sick; the kind that stays with you until your sinuses are clear and you remember what oxygen smells like. In the middle of this, all anyone could think about was THE BABY.
“When THE BABY comes, we will have to make sure that we don’t get THE BABY sick. Blah blah blah THE BABY blah blah, blah blah blah blah THE BABY.”
My father had brought hospital masks home for all of us to wear. When the moment came we all stood there waiting for my parents to arrive, sniffling, breathing heavily through tightly knit cloth.
I remember wondering who was more traumatized by the masks. I was young, only two years old, and the mask blocked my entire face. No one could find me. There was no telling the time I would have to stay in the mask. I had no idea how long sniffles lasted or how quickly babies grew up. But my brother, Paul, he must have been terrified. This was his first homecoming. He had never met us before. He hadn’t met that many people at all. There were no warm smiles for him. We were sterilized and homogenized. All he could see were eyes floating over a sea of white and under a mountain of hairlines. There was a barrier between the family and Paul. No one even knew I was there.
My aunt predicted how small a two-year-old with a little brother could feel. She brought me something special so that I could feel important too. When my mother carried in the baby, my aunt carried in a folding chair with my name, Janet, J-A-N-E-T spelled out on the back. My name on my chair. She called it a director’s chair, and I had no idea what that was. I knew the chair was mine.
The next few years of my life feel the same as the beginning. The masks came off by the end of the week, but no one ever found me again. Not even in my chair. Now, so many years later, I’m surprised I didn’t do more to grab attention. I never really thought about what I could do to be noticed. I thought about how I was going to handle being alone. My given was that there would be voids in my life. My problem was how to fill them.
I tried to have friends. I remember starting nursery school. I really wanted friends. Everyone else seemed to have them. No one my age ever understood me.
My nursery school had a pool behind the main building. You had to walk through the woods a while to reach the pool. Every walk held new fascination for me. It was spring, and the woods were alive. The trees and plants grew perceptibly every week. The baby animals were starting to gain independence and to look like the parents who taught them how to walk weeks earlier. I noticed everything, and I wanted to watch, to learn and to remember it all. I stalled until the group was ahead of me so that it would be quiet, and I could see the butterflies and the deer reappear after the flurry of three-year-olds had passed. It must have been beautiful. It had to have been. Otherwise, I have no way to explain the pain I was willing to cause myself.
The first time we took this walk and I rejoined the group, the teachers scolded me. They told me I had been “dilly-dallying”. The kids called me a slowpoke. Everyone asked what I had been doing. I told them. This was a big mistake in calculation. Watching nature was natural to me, and I didn’t know it was strange to anyone else. No one ever asked what I was doing again. From then on, they just pointed and laughed. I never stopped doing it though. Like I said, to me it came naturally. As many times as I thought it through in my head, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, so I didn’t know how to fix the problem. I figured this was just who I was meant to be. I was the least popular three-year-old in the school, and as far as I knew, in the world. The identity became comfortable.
I decided that in order to figure out why I had no friends, I would watch other kids and learn their behavior. I knew I could mimic, so this would be easy. What I didn’t know was that small children are not supposed to people-watch. Here is how it works – if you are a grad student in a major metropolitan area wearing a black mock-turtleneck, faded jeans and black leather boots you are allowed to people watch from any cafe as you read Goethe, smoke natural tobacco cigarettes and sip black coffee. If you are three, and someone else who is three asks you why you are just sitting there, you are NOT allowed to say that you are just watching everyone else to learn what they do. Kids thought I was weird because I was different from them. I thought I was weird because I was the only person I knew who enjoyed people watching. The solution of watching and mimicking to appear normal had backfired. I looked stranger than ever.
For the first time in my life I became depressed. I wanted to fit in. I still believed that if I could only act normal, no one would notice how strange I was inside. Every time I tried to pull off the normal act, I would blow my own cover. It would start with something very simple. A child would come over and say, “what are you doing?” I would reply, “wondering why people are sad sometimes and happy other times.”
I always expected the other kid to get it. Even if that child was the meanest bully on the playground. My naivete made me believe that the kid would answer, “Oh yeah, I think about that too. Can I sit here so we can think together?” I didn’t hope that the kid would say that, I expected the kid to say that. I was doing what I enjoyed. I couldn’t understand why no one else enjoyed the same activity. Every day I was newly horrified at the shrieks of laughter at my expense.
I became more and more silent. Introspection was my best hiding place. I would turn inside whenever I was expected to talk. Lunch and recess became my quietest times of day. I taught myself to meditate. I would sit very still and achieve true inner silence. The louder the din around me became, the further I was able to pull away. I never ignored the other kids – ignoring involves noticing and choosing not to respond. I never saw or heard anyone to begin with. I was the un-carved block, and I was completely at peace.
Then, I would be jolted back to reality. A noise or a motion would tear me away from my thoughts. Startled by the surrounding commotion it had previously been unaware of, my body would jump. Remembering that I’m still three, the inevitable result of jumping up during lunchtime is that I would knock over my juice. These were the days before juice boxes. My juice came in a can. It was a small can, about six ounces, and it was made out of hard, unbendable metal. It was sealed with a flap of foil that you peeled back, and that didn’t reseal. That sort of can, if knocked over, is spilling everything inside of it.
I spilled an entire can of juice two or three times a week. My teacher reprimanded me, and I said that I couldn’t stop because it was an accident. She said that it couldn’t be. In front of the class, she said I spilled juice on purpose. I cried, and protested that it was as accident. I told her how I had been thinking by myself, that I was in another place in my head, and that I didn’t even know the can was there until it spilled. She told me I was a liar. The kids now had a good excuse to laugh – even the adults knew there was something wrong with me. Even though logic told me that I couldn’t prevent an accident, I started to wonder myself. What was wrong with me? How come the things that made sense in my mind couldn’t connect with anyone else? Could anybody hear me?