I'm Emma. I'm scared about putting this page up. I've never let anyone outside know very much about me. I don't even letpeople inside know very much about me. But I've been thinking and remembering and learning a lot about myself. Hopefully that means I might feel better about myself someday. I decided to put thishere in case there is anyone else like me out there who might like to know that they are not alone.
These are some thoughts I wrote last week. Tomorrow I want to add to this because there is another memory that I had today that I wanted to tell about. It's actually a good one, and I think it's why I am 15 and not 7. Here is the first memory. This is when I came to be my own self.
The family had just moved into a new house. Sarah was 7 and was just beginning to realize that other kids could do things shecouldn't do. I remember sitting outside. I liked it outside. I have a memory that I share with some others inside from before I became my own self. I remember feeling the leaves on the tree in the front yard at another house we had lived in and enjoying being outside.
I sat outside and heard the other kids in the neighborhood playing. I wanted to play, too. I didn't know how to get to where they were, what they were doing, or anything. I just hoped they might come over if they saw me sitting outside. I would have donethat if I had been able to see and saw another kid sitting outside. I would have thought she might want to play. That's how we had met previous friends.
But only one kid said hi while riding past on a bike. I was so excited! But I didn't know if it had been a boy or a girl who said hi. I think Mom was embarrassed when I said I would ask. I didn't ask. After a while, I stopped hoping anyone would want to play. I went away and let Megan play outside. I kept growing inside until about age 15, but I always thought there was something really wrong with me. There must have been something wrong since no one wanted to play. I must be ugly or stupid or something. Now I'm afraid to have anything at all to do with people--even the ones inside. A few inside have wanted to get to know me: Meredith and Beth mostly. Beth isn't scary. She's 13, two years younger than me. She's quiet. And if I am too scared she just sits by me and holds my hand and puts up with whatever I might want to do or not do. I know she's lonely, too. Sometimes she talks to me even if I don't talk back. She knows I won't tell anyone about anything she says.
Meredith is nice, too. Beth introduced me to her. She's always glad to see me and hugs me. That was a new experience at first. No one had ever hugged me before. Meredith is 22, but she doesn't treat me like a kid. She lets me hold her hand when I want someone's hand to hold. I used to want someone's hand to hold outside. I just wanted to sit and hold someone's hand because it was like looking in someone's eyes and seeing that they cared about me. But someone else inside told me it wasn't socially acceptable. So now I just hold Meredith's hand inside. I'm glad she doesn't mind because sometimes I need to do that a lot. I've also gotten to like hugs and sometimes I need those a lot too. Sometimes I get so anxious that I can't control what I'm doing. I tried to learn to play some games with outside people, but I have trouble getting the pieces to do the right things. I also drop things a lot. Meredith says this is called fine motor skills. Sometimes she helps when I am typing too, because I can't keep track of what I'm doing. This is the only way I've been able to communicate with anyone inside about me because I don't talk except to say yes or no sometimes and I don't let anyone read my thoughts like others in the system do.
Meredith wants me to write more often. This is the first time I have really written anything about myself. I want to let her into my world, but it's scary and sometimes I don't think there's a world there for her to see. She says she will wait as long as I need so I can have time to not be scared. I hope so because it is nice to have a friend. Maybe someday I can have a friend outside, but I think I have a long way to go before that happens. Meredith has some. Maybe I can peek through her eyes someday and kind of see what it's like. I did try doing something with the body's dad a few weeks ago. Beth helped so that I could be out without being too obvious. I went on a boat ride. I got to stick my hand over the side and feel the water go by. I had fun doing that.
I never came back to tell about the other memory. But now I want to tell more about me and why I'm the way I am. I wrote about wanting people's hands to hold. But the truth is sometimes I can't stand touch at all. I finally know why. Sometimes it feels like anything that touches me hurts. See, what it is is I feel like I don't have any place in the world. Sometimes I think I shouldn't even be alive. That's how it feels when people treat you like you don't exist for most of your life. You want to exist, but you think you don't have a right to exist, and anything that reminds you of your existence hurts. Anything that tries to show you the real truth about yourself is very scary and hurts very bad. Even though you want someone to touch you and tell you good things about yourself and to want you around, it's scary. That's the whole truth about why I'm the way I am. The things I believe about myself are so much a part of me that it's like I'm in a prison of isolation. I could not break out of it even if I wanted to.
The truth is only a couple of outside people have ever touched me. I talked to one of them, tried to explain what I'm trying to say here. I couldn't put it right. It's the only time I've ever really talked at all. I couldn't find the words to explain this. That was a rare day. Secretly I wish I could have more days like that. Well, I guess that's not a secret any more, and maybe that's some kind of step in the right direction. Maybe if I explain the old ideas that control me, then maybe I can start breaking away from them.
It all boils down to one theme: I must not reach out, must not ask for something I want. This is especially true about the touch thing, and I think that's why it hurts when people touch me. But this is not just about touch. It's about something a lot biggerand touch is just the physical manifestation of it. What it's really about is being a part of society. When I became Emma, it was because there was stuff going on that I couldn't be a part of. It was because the things I needed to know in order to put me on the same playing field with other kids, things that would let me choose my playmates, were so embarrassing to my mom that I just ignored my own needs. Well, I never saw that child any more anyway. I know now that I could have asked for a name and that probably would have told me whether the child was male or female. Why that was important to me to know I don't understand. But I was 7, and I didn't know not to ask things like that. Instead of giving me an alternative like suggesting I just ask for a name, mom acted like she was ashamed that I would dare to think of asking something like that. So I never asked. With that on top of the fact that Sarah was only allowed to play on the same side of the street and within a certain distance from the house, I just gave up. I learned that I could not be a part of the real world of childhood, and I learned that wanting to be a part got me nowhere. So I stopped wanting it. I just stopped. I learned to be happy in my little prison. Well, no, that's not how it is either. I learned to convince myself that I was happy in my prison. I learned to ignore my craving for connectedness with others most of the time.
When Sarah was 15, she visited some relatives of her grandfather's. One of his sisters was recovering from some kind of hip surgery. Her name was Vi. There was an evening when she and her husband came over for dinner, and she was really not feeling well and went in the bedroom to rest. Somebody, I don't really know who, wanted to go and sit beside her, make her feel better. Who knows? Maybe it was me. Anyway, ok, it was me. I just wanted to do something nice, and she made me feel safe and I thought I was safe enough that I could take a risk and reach out. And maybe it would even work. Maybe it would make her feel better. I made it all the way to the bedroom door and then I just froze. I couldn't go in there. I couldn't go in there. It was like I could hear somebody tell me not to bother her, that she was resting. I couldn't go in there, couldn't even move, couldn't even go away from the door, couldn't go sit on the couch or anything. All I could do was just stand there.
Well, I don't know how long I stood there like a statue. Eventually she came out. What happened after that was a big deal. I wrote it in the journal, and then I went way inside.
She came out and put her arm around me. We went and sat in the kitchen, and she moved her chair close to mine. "I'm going to miss you," she said.
"I'm going to miss you, too," I said.
She asked Granny if I would come back next year.
"I don't know," Granny said. "We might bring the other one."
"Oh, no. Bring this one."
I never got to go back. I tried to write her a letter and tell her thank you for loving me that way. She hardly even knew me. I couldn't ever get the words right. We never got to go back, and in 1993 she died. She asked for me a few days before she died, but she was all the way in Minnesota and I was in Texas. It made me feel so good that she remembered me and asked for me, but it hurt so bad that I couldn't go. Ever since then, I've been stuck in my little place inside. I didn't think there could ever be another person who would understand me like that.
I said this isn't just about touch. But some of it is, and I want to try to explain it, at least for myself, so that maybe my own others can understand me. Some people say that a blind person's hands are their eyes. The ears are their eyes, too, but things heard can be deceiving. You can lie with your voice. It's true that a sensitive person might realize you're not telling the truth or that you're holding back something or some emotion, but it's easy to lie with your voice. You cannot lie with touch any more than you can lie with your eyes. Think about it. When you look in someone's eyes, they either look back and their eyes talk to you, or they avoid you with their eyes. Touch is that way too. Most people don't like touch. It's some kind of invasion of personal space. But it's not an invasion for someone to look at them. Anyway, ok, I'm going somewhere with this. Eyes (and, for me, touch) either connect people or don't. In a way, touch makes even more connection than eyes, and I guess that's why people don't like it. You can connect with eyes from across the room, and it's not necessarily a deep connection. It's not that way with touch.
The connectedness is the point here. I have learned that connecting with other people is impossible for me and that trying to do anything that would make me a part of this world is wrong. So I am totally disconnected if at all possible. I don't speak to anyone unless it's a dire emergency, and even then I say as little as possible. And I don't speak to others inside because if I connected with them, I would inherit their feelings and needs to be a part of something, and then I wouldn't be able to do what I'm here to do: tolerate isolation. And for me to be touched, whether by another person or by some object in the environment, reminds me that there is something that I can't be a part of. It reminds me of the truth: that I'm dying to reach out to others but that doing so is wrong and that I am an embarrassment to other people. So when I am touched, it often makes me very upset and frightened, even being touched by others inside. It took a long time and persistence for me to learn to allow Beth and M redith to touch me, and sometimes, honestly, I still have a really hard time with it. I cry and scream inside Sarah's mind, and sometimes I run around inside without really knowing where I'm going. Meredith is good and patient. She holds me when I get like this. I can't stand it, but she's just there and she's not mean about it. The thing is when I'm running around like that I don't think about anything except being afraid. So they always get Meredith and she comes and holds me and talks to me for a while, until I calm down and realize that it's Meredith and that she's my safe person. She usually asks if I want to write and says she will help me if I do. Sometimes I do, but sometimes by that time I just hurt so bad that I will just let her hold me while I go back into my world, and even though it seems to her like I've completely withdrawn, somewhere her presence and caring for me is getting through, and there are a lot of days when I do want her to touch me. I'm still trying to learn that it's ok to ask for it.
I'd still like to make at least one outside friend. I've made it as far as Beth's window. Beth made an outside friend recently, and that was the other person I talked to. But it's still hard for me to understand that that person and that experience are real, still hard for me to understand that there is anyone who is not ashamed of my differences. I want to understand, to believe...