I have a love/hate relationship with my own subconscious mind. Sometimes it presents really random things for me to contemplate when my alarm goes off in the morning.
The topic du jour is an incident that happened to me at 6th grade camp (this was the one I went to up in the North Bay). I just diagnosed a serious illness that I got there, and it disturbs me more than I care to admit, but I feel compelled to write it down.
We were doing the "trust exercise" pictured above, and the camp people had the person falling stand up on the edge of a picnic table, and about 6-8 students on the ground were supposed to catch them.
When it came to be my turn, I wasn't too confident. The adult told me to to just trust and fall back. So I did. I can't even describe the sickening lurch as I realized mid-fall that the people who were supposed to catch me had stepped back and folded their arms. I hit the ground full force, striking my head and my back on the ground. The kids laughed. I couldn't even breathe; the wind was knocked out of me. I remember crying, out of pain but also out of incomprehension. Why did they do that? Why to me?
Later that night, I started vomiting. A lot. I don't think they called my mom, or she would have come to get me. For years I assumed that I had gotten food poisoning. But this morning it dawned on me that the vomiting was a classic sign that I actually had a concussion or had bruised my spinal cord.
Not only had the kids given me a reason to have a lifelong mistrust of other people, but the adults, in what was doubtless an attempt to hide their liability, had covered it up and let me down, too.
That certainly isn't the only reason I have trouble trusting others, but boy it sure sticks out. Recalling that this morning was a very visceral experience. I was still half asleep, and thought about the faces of the kids who were laughing at me for trying to trust them. One of them grew up to be a somewhat famous professional volleyball player, I recall. Ostensibly a team player, right?
Thinking about that, all these years later, hurts deeply. It surprises me how fresh and accessible that feeling is. I'm on the verge of crying just thinking about it right now. I have been carrying that inside me all this time, and I can see how it has affected my ability to trust other people to catch me. I generally don't. I rely on myself, taking on the weight of the world without asking for much help. I can't unload my burdens on other people because I don't trust them. I don't even give the people close to me enough credit in that regard.
Why does that get to be true? It was a shitty thing that happened to me. But it doesn't have to be who I am now. I have grown up and hopefully learned to tell which people are worthy of my trust. But I can see that even the people I want to trust pose a challenge for me. Being vulnerable is extremely difficult for me. It makes me feel like I am about to fall backward and nobody is going to reach out and catch me.
For a long time, I thought my mom didn't come for me when I got sick. I realized just this morning that they hid my injury from her. She didn't know. I really need to reframe my thinking about that incident. I was abused by strangers, not neglected by my mother. That is a big difference.
I'm going to try. I'm going to try to trust someone today. The world is full of people worth trusting. I can be safe. There are arms that want to catch me if I let them. I wonder what that would be like?
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