The first time that I remember placing limits on myself was when i still at an age where schooling wasn't for me. It was a hard memory to dredge up, especially when it involved negative feelings. In that sense, perhaps I had sealed those memories away myself, with a few particularly traumatic or dreadful ones that snuck out to torment me occasionally.
As it goes, the earliest that I could remember was heading to the playground. We had many trips to the place filled with slides, swings and other odds and ends that seemed fun to me no matter what they looked like. The thing is, they only seemed that way. As a kid, I would always imagine myself doing this and that, like the cartoons I've seen on TV. That there was this red-caped man who could leap a skyscraper in a single bound, or that there was this mouse who could fly and a particular grey cat who could do all kinds of stunts, get injured, then appeared fine again.
I always wanted to try things, I remembered. There was this new swing, or there was this new toy that looked like a plane and could glide around if you threw it hard and far enough. I wanted to try them all the time, but that one visit that seemed so nondescript, so commonplace changed my perspective, possibly even up till now.
There was once I saw a kid standing on a swing, swinging as hard as he could and laughing as he did so. To me, it looked awesome. Where did he learn to do that? It was like a new thing to me, even if other people had done it before him, and I just wanted to do it.
My parents were adamant, of course. They refused to let me try, mainly because it was understandably dangerous for me to do so. What happened if I fell and hurt myself, like I did when I ran too fast around the stairs and had a considerable amount of skin burnt off my leg by a pot? Being the little kid I was, I wailed about it for a bit. "Why couldn't I do it when the other kids could? Their parents were there too!"
They refused again, of course, and cajoled me into calming down. I didn't know how they did it, considering how spoiled I felt I was last time. But that was it. And being the kid I was, I decided to disobey them. It felt as though they had limited my choice to do something interesting and fun! It felt as though I should be doing this kind of things, since I wasn't given the chance to do what I wanted before.
Then I went up on the swing when my parents weren't looking. Putting my two little feet on the seat, I tried to stand up.
I couldn't.
My legs were trembling so much that they felt like jelly. Despite the bravado I had earlier, it seemed as though the courage had flew out of me like the sudden gust of wind that blew. It took me quite a while, but in the end I managed to stand up, quavering like a leaf hanging from the branch in the strong wind.
I didn't quite know what happened, but I remember a force from behind pushing me. I was totally unprepared and felt like I really flew - only it wasn't the sensation of freedom or satisfaction that I thought I could have.
It was fear.
I fell hard and probably cried so hard that those living on the seventh storey could probably hear me. My parents came rushing back, of course, and I saw a grown woman severely reprimanding the apparent culprit - her son, the one who had done it before.
I could remember his countenance. He felt genuinely sorry and even cried a little about it. I remember looking at him with tear-filled eyes of my own blankly, but managed to stop crying somehow. I remember my parents smiling at the woman, telling her that it was fine. I remember one of them scolding me and the other saying that it was fine for me to try out.
But most of all, I remembered that that was when a small, tiny voice came forth, telling me one thing constantly for a while.
You can't do it.
And guess what? I really couldn't. I really felt I could no longer do stuff like this. Trying out new things because I might get hurt again. Getting the sand all over my body with blood running down my legs. The pain felt so bad, the danger of the new and the unknown so real...That I retreated immediately.
Never again. Never would I want to get hurt again.
And though I know that in the future I kept wanting to try new things, eventually I procrastinate. Sometimes the words rang empty even to me. At others, I did try, only for interest to fizzle out or for discouragement to set in that I retreated easily.
Perhaps this was the memory that locked me in the realm of self-limitation. Perhaps that was why when I had a great influx of creativity and could write, there was something that was always missing - the spark needed to ignite the dynamite for the story to explode into a colorful, entertaining narrative that I always wanted it to be.
And perhaps by doing this Writing Projects and Fast Flow Writing assignments as much as I can, I can overcome it. I've got the King with me too, so it should work out fine.
Dreams, here I come.
No comments:
Post a Comment