2:05am September 5, 2013

Playgrounds are hell on earth.

I’ve been having some conversations that have been bringing up all kinds of memories I try not to think about most of the time.

One of those memories. Big giant public school playgrounds.

There are so many things I wish about that time.

I wish I’d more consistently known I could remove myself from unpleasant situations.

I wish I’d had more connection between things like experience, thought, and action.

I wish.

But here is how it was.

Seven years old. Giant playground. Hot California sun during a drought. Sometimes so hot that we weren’t allowed on the playground.

Burning that wasn’t the sun. But I connected it with summer because it burned like the sun. Except it burned day and night summer and winter inside my skin. Nothing ever made it better. Not even pressing my whole body up against cold flat surfaces like mirrors and tile floors. Lots of things made it worse.

The burning is everywhere. Not just inside me. It’s outside me too. It’s everywhere. In the sky. On the ground. Everything is burning.

I can’t ever see or hear a whole thing at once. Squeals and things that might be the words I am beginning to understand except I can’t right now. Light glancing off everything. Lots of movement. Everything is a big jumble.

But it only gets worse because there are other fragments of sensation. The scrape of a knee on pavement. Burning hands where a tetherball hit too hard. Throats hoarse from yelling.

The shrill, simplified intensity of kid feelings. Fear. Rage. Intensity. Unfairness. Focus. Determination. Disappointment.

All of this and more. How many kids were out there? A hundred? More? Every single one of them scraped against my burning skin as if they had touched me.

I could not find myself under all of them. I could not find thoughts or feelings or body sensations in a world that was dominated by everyone else’s. It was like suffocating on the bottom of a giant pile of kids, only it wasn’t my body that was suffocating, it was something inside me. When I felt everything as if it was me, there was no way to sort out what was coming from where.

But never did it occur to me that I could walk away from the playground and find refuge somewhere. Oh, I did that, plenty of times. But it didn’t occur to me that I could do it on purpose.

I walked right out into the middle of it. I tried to do things. Sometimes weird things of my own. Sometimes what other people were doing. I don’t think I controlled which. I don’t know that I had control of much of anything.

Which is why when other kids figured out they could add just a little more stimulation and reduce me to a screaming wreck, they did. Because I had no control at that point either.

But.

Nobody seemed to understand that I didn’t walk out there, self-contained, in my own skin, centered on one physical location, contained in one body that felt only what happened to it and not, also, everything around it.

No, actually I felt like I was everywhere, and nowhere, at the same time. All these things that technically took place outside of me, I felt them as if they were inside of me. Somehow I couldn’t differentiate. I felt like I was in the entire schoolyard and that things that took place inside of it took place inside of me. I felt as if everything was so big and so intense I couldn’t even see or hear or feel except in a jumble of pieces.

And this was every day. This was during the part of school that was supposed to be a break from all the hard parts. Except it was never a break because it was the worst kind of bombardment I could imagine. It wasn’t just direct sensory bombardment it was indirect as well, coming from directions I couldn’t even understand. And it was also emotional and cognitive bombardment. All coming from outside and all drowning out everything inside of me.

The burning, by the way, is apparently neuropathy inherited from my mother. But the rest, the rest was having no filters, having no sense of where I stopped and everything else started, being bombarded from outside and feeling it on the inside. No differentiation.

I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to have senses that didn’t overflow and bleed into each other in unexpected ways and shatter to pieces under the force of the world around me. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to walk out there and just felt my own feelings and sensations and been aware of others without them becoming my own. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have actions connected to thoughts connected to perceptions connected to experiences and all tidy and relatively easy to control.

I wish more than anything, that I had existed somewhere where neither playgrounds nor large hordes of noisy people had been invented. Because I didn’t have the skills to remove myself from the situation consistently enough to do any good. I knew that other situations felt better, but that didn’t give me the ability to choose those situations and then maneuver myself into them.

This is all I can say. I can’t explain why things happened I can just say that they happened. I never understood those kids who proudly said their favorite subject was recess. To me that was like saying my favorite subject was walking on lava for fun.

Also this is the serious downside to putting my earth and water side out into an incredibly chaotic situation and watching it try to function.