I was quite a stressed out kid. I was supremely organised, I would know where everything in my room was to the centimetre. I feel like that’s not actually true, but it was certainly my intention. I had several fears, heights, baboons (you run across them quite often if you camp in the South of South Africa), escalators, lifts, various people who I deemed to be dodgy. In fact, whenever my parents drove through a neighbourhood that felt was too scary to me, I would close my eyes and ears. I figured that they always came home safely without me, so I would just pretend not to be there, that way we’d all be safe.
I’m telling you this because I am no longer a child. Some fears were easily grown out of, and I had to do very little to defeat them - fear of the dark was quickly forgotten. Others I must still battle. Each year when my parents and I go camping, I jump into rock pools to continually challenge my fear of heights, and slowly I become less and less sensitive. I feel a bit like an alcoholic, though, that I will always be afraid of heights and it’s just something I have to deal with. I also now keep my eyes open in the car, but that is mostly due to the fact that I drive myself and I am not especially in the mood for a catastrophe.
That fear and stress and need to control was a part of my life and my mind as a child. I now share my 23 year old mind with that scared boy, and though I have grown up and my behaviour is a far cry from what it once was, my scared inner child sometimes rises to the surface. My inner voice sometimes feels like an old whiteboard. People have written on it and erased their words for years and years, and now, though you write something new, it always feels as if you can read some ancient, not quite erased sentence. Similarly, my thought patterns are not so easily erased. The words and fears of my childhood are visible if you squint.
I want to leave you with hope, though. When the words I erased long ago become too visible, I know now to recognise the voice of my younger self. I have learnt, in becoming an adult, that fear and danger are not the same. I read the phantom sentence, and then promptly clean my whiteboard.