I sat in silence one morning on my day off. I wanted to think back on my life and see how far I’ve come. The kind of memories that revisited me were surprising. If you wear headphones and listen to music while rethinking your life, you instantly have your own movie in your head. Funny enough, that’s how I felt at least. Have you ever thought about how you came to be where you are now and why you do what you do?
There is a seemingly insignificant memory I have of first grade, but I never really thought more of it until now. My favorite color was pink. I simply thought it was pretty, bright, rosy. One day in elementary school, my classmates were talking about favorite colors. When I told them mine was pink, I didn’t receive a positive response. Some kids told me pink is a girly-girl color and being that way isn’t cool. Some kids would go so far to say that being a girl meant you were weak too. Eventually I had enough of being picked on for liking pink. I tried hard to authentically fall in love with another color. Inspiration came through my first-grade teacher. She loved butterflies and the color purple, and it was clearly evident if you ever visited her home. She was a kind lady and I wanted to be gentle and kind like her. I thought her spirit was beautiful and it made everything about her beautiful. I changed my favorite color to purple because of her. It represented a strong, beautiful, feminine spirit to me.
This memory is connected to how I formulated opinions of myself. In elementary school, I remember asking my best friend at the time if he thought I was strong and cool. I think he said I was… the fact that I was able to play soccer with the boys at recess was a good enough answer for me. The girls in my class were very girly and I wasn’t in their friend group. I got quite a bit of validation from boys. Even though I knew I was a girl, I had this desire to be perceived as strong and capable. I also wanted to be seen as beautiful, but I couldn’t really figure out how to be both at the same time. How can I describe the nature of the waters inside of me? There were waves of intensity and deep belief. There was a steady current of desire to be strong in every way I knew how. Streams of compassion easily flowed as I naturally felt a gentleness towards nature and other humans. I felt both a strong masculine energy as well as a feminine energy buried beneath. I grew into a tomboy shortly after first or second grade.
For me, my tomboy-ness was expressed mostly in the way I dressed. I still played with Polly Pockets and baby dolls. I loved Barbies more than any other toy because my twin sister and I would create stories and live through the dolls. We created whole worlds and crazy plots, evil villains, and heroes. It was awesome to allow our imagination to be free in our playroom. We both would wake up on the weekends with our sole purpose being to figure out how to save the barbie family from evil world, as we would call it. Our stories were always so apocalyptic. I mean seriously, it was zombie wars, earthquakes, stars falling from the sky, and pandemics. Other days we would have more normal stories like a teenager misbehaving and lying to her parents. I may share more on our barbie stories in another post sometime because it’s funny. But anyways, I believe this is where I expressed early spirituality with my twin sister. I think my first song was written when I was playing one day. I remember it had three words: “Time goes by.” Silly, but I remember that was it. I didn’t know how to play any instruments at the time. Shortly after first grade I started piano lessons.
One memory is leading to another. But that is simply my point. Memories are connected and I believe they are connected like water molecules. I share my story about how I came to love the color purple because for some reason, that choice of mine was special. It was one of the many early moments of self-development that I can remember. Why are the moments of personality development special to me anyways? Because I don’t think it came easily to me. I don’t think I had the support I needed to develop my individuality. I remember my desire to be my unique self was met with conflict in my household. When I finally got to have my own room, I could only choose decoration and bedding that matched the rest of the house and remained acceptable to my mother. There were always a strict set of rules that I had to fight against that had nothing to do with moral decisions. If it didn’t make my parents happy, specifically my mother, I couldn’t have it. So began my struggle with discovering what I liked and why I liked it.
One more memory is leading to another. In that new room of mine, I remember my very first diary. It was one of the ones with a lock on it. In that diary was where I wrote my first few sentences about love. I know it was about the first boy I liked at the time. One day my mother forced me to show her what was inside even though I said no. She forced her way in to read my precious elementary secret right in front of me, and I was devastated. I remember crying because I was so embarrassed and sad that she would make me feel that way. She was shocked that I was so upset because she didn’t think it was a big deal. Hence why I became very protective of my journals and my memories.
We need to cultivate and question the memories we have because they help us understand ourselves, where we come from, and why we do what we do. If we need to understand the details, we can recall what happened in the past and figure out what came from those moments. Like I said before, memories are connected like water molecules. We need as many as we can to make sense of the whole picture. If we want to understand who we are, we need to know where we came from. That is why we need to remember our past. We need to celebrate our successes and tend to our wounds. In order to do that, we need not suppress our emotions, but remember them. We open mental portals and paths when we spend time with our memories.
I will say some memories are meant to be left alone, because there is nothing more we can gain from them. In order to find true healing and understanding, it is vital to find the root of the problem, the source of the pain, the cause of the symptoms. So rather than dismissing what hurts you, why don’t you go back and think about when it all began. Why don’t you begin to remember? Remember good things and remember not so good things. Our past is like that one book on the shelf we left there to collect dust, but sometimes we need to refer to it to find answers. That is why it is still on the shelf. You have memories for a reason, so when problems begin to arise, you need to remember you.