Reconciliation

My skin scares me sometimes. I try not to stare at it too long, for when I do, I fall prey to the terror that arises when I imagine the vast web of bone and tissue that lies so closely beneath. What a complex machine we humans are. I am both fascinated and repelled. Moments like these make me question the wiseness of my choosing an objective field like psychology. It too both fascinates and repels me. I am drawn to the information and knowledge it offers me about myself and others, yet also disheartened to think that people can be categorized and analyzed to the point that life is no longer a mystery.

I am the type of person who believes in following rules and directions, in sticking closer to what is tried and true than to what is unknown. I would never be called rebellious or innovative. I am responsibile and reliable. As I believe I should be. But what of the rest? What of the child within me who I have tried so hard to keep silent? It is her voice that I hear when control and responsibility cease being enough. When I cease being enough. She is the voice of temptation and yearning, the part of me that stares at the moon and has to believe that there is something more to life than everyday motions and plain reality.

In the Bible, we are told to be like children, for children are innocent. That is a notion that has always struck a chord within me. I want to be a child, yet I have become who I am today by stifling childish urges and feelings. I am not stupid enough to claim I never act like one. But I can say truthfully that I never endeavor to be one. Even as a child, I was more interested in the adults, in studying them and gaining their attention. I wanted to have their confidence and was fascinated by their language, the way they spoke so simply and straightforwardly. Still, the more I grow, the more weary I become. Will I ever reach the level of confidence and assurance that I want for myself? And if I do, will it lay to rest all these longings and questions? I fear the answer is no.

All the more frustrating is the fact that I am to blame. Children are to be cherished for more than their innocence. For while that is an admirable trait and one worth emulating, it is their ability to live that we must envy. For children, there is no past or future. There is only the present. They don't have to grasp life by the reigns because they were born in possession of them. It is maturity and reality that wrestle life away from us, because we come to believe that being an adults means working to obtain something we don't have. The problem: no one ever tells us what it is. The reason: we already had it. But the world doesn't want us to know that, for if we all stopped trying to be something and/or someone else and started trying just as desperately to be ourselves, there would be an economic meltdown and rich people would cease to be rich. That people could think for themselves, act for themselves...the horror!

Yet even as I rail against this faulty socialization process, I am unable to rid myself of the comforting weight of the world, the one I donned so eagerly in order to dull the pain I now associate with childhood. And I realize that I am setting myself up for a worse fall; the realization that the world is even more cruel and capable of inflicting pain at a level unknown to children. The reason I could never be present was because I always felt the past nipping at my heels. The future and contemplation of it offered the illusion of distance and thus safety. How wrong I was and am.

"With one hand the past pulls us forward, with the other it holds it back" And I find that my desperate grasp on the future is based on the fact that I am only holding on one-handed. My other hand clings tightly, stubbornly, just as desperately, to the past.