For the children I tended when I couldn’t tend myself - Memoir Shard 3

 

Blurb - Texture

A four part memoir blast about the years when I was too young to carry what I carried, and too old to be protected from any of it. These are the shards: the overwhelm, the rescue missions, the masks, and the borrowed families that held me together when I didn’t know how to hold myself.

The Graveyard & The Drop

In my early teens, the emotional drops always came around my period. I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time—I just knew something in me dipped and everything felt too much. Sometimes my thoughts went to dramatic places: bridges, water, train tracks. Not because I wanted to die, but because my head was overloaded and I had no language for any of it. Quick fix thinking, I suppose.

One day, in one of those dips, I took myself to a graveyard. I don’t even really know why. I went looking for the children’s section. I don’t know how I even knew there would be one, but I walked straight to it. When I found it, it was completely overgrown—grass everywhere, no care, no tending—and it horrified me.

And in my ND mind, the only thing that made sense was that I should come back with my gardening tools. I always gardened. I always had a few tools. It was the one thing I could do easily. So that became my plan: go home, get the tools, and fix the part of the world that felt as neglected as I did. Rescue, I guess—externalising what I needed internally.

I wasn’t a child, I wasn’t an adult, and I didn’t know what to do with all the baggage I’d already collected by twelve.

Mini footnote:

Here is the kicker I'm a child. In life I have never fit, until now because finally I know why.