How do you remember your childhood?
How did the world perceive you as a child? What do you remember of the feedback you got from the world around you, when you were young — family, friends, schoolmates? And how did that feedback match up with — or clash with — your own perception of yourself?
After years of processing, brooding and stewing on something, we can easily slip into a "victim role" over things/words we once upon a time internalized as negative, when in fact they were merely neutral. Similarly, we can sometimes allow the rose-colored glasses of passing time to gloss over something truly awful that happened to us.
As part of my own process of discovering who I really was, growing up... and how that shaped and informed my adult life, I went through a few exercises and explorations in going backwards to the source of my past and present self-perception.
In order to avoid making too many snap judgments, I ended up just making a list of single words that seemed to surround me a lot, when I was a kid.
Shy
Quiet
Polite
Aloof
Distant
Daydreaming
Cautious
Serious
Detached
Silent
Watching
Compliant
Fearful
Retiring
Are these words "bad?" Moreover, are they true? To what degree did they represent me, and to what degree did they represent other people's personal foibles and insecurities?
What we have here is merely a list of words that are reflections of what other people saw in me — objective, or otherwise.
It was a useful — and often revealing — exercise to consider (without assigning "judgment" or "negative meanings") how people got these perceptions and walk through the list, item by item. The point here, is to take these words we perhaps carry around as "negative" (which can turn us into victims) and instead look at them objectively and "own" them.
For example, I was not shy as a kid, but I am a lifelong introvert. I like people, but socializing tends to exhaust me. The reality is that I was not very social, but there is the context of being raised by social butterflies, so through their eyes I was apparently shy.
Was I fearful? Perhaps I was, but the context there is that there were usually severe and painful consequences of doing anything the adults disapproved of. Undeniably, that shaped my life to a degree... but caution isn't necessarily a negative thing.
I am getting to the "old and grey" stage of life now, and I have long since gotten past the perception that people thought negatively of me as a kid. Most of those perceptions weren't actually bad, but I spent a good number of years interpreting them out of context, and that did cause me some emotional pain.
However, I got it examined and dealt with before falling into the "victim hole."
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2025.02.20 01:05 PST
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