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Growing up, I was quite the wild child. In my early years, I spent hours in the mossy glade in the forest behind our house, conversing with the fairy folk, and refusing to come down from my favourite climbing tree for dinner. Later on in childhood, we lived on a sailboat and traveled around Central and South America. I traded fairies for fish, and climbed the mast of our boat instead, clinging on nearly fifty feet up as I swayed back and forth in the gently rolling waves. I wasn’t allowed to go above the first set of spreaders that crossed the mast at about twenty feet high, but sometimes I did anyway.
Since we moved so often from place to place, I didn’t have regular friendships. Instead I made friends with the characters in books. I had imaginary friends, borrowed from the pages I devoured, or from my own mind. My favourite chore was scraping barnacles off the hull of our boat, and in doing so I learned to hold my breath long enough to free-dive over thirty feet. I danced whenever I wanted to. I jumped off the side of the boat and into the ocean without a second thought. I traipsed through rainforests and perfected the call of the howler monkeys.
When I returned to normal society, and along with it high school, I was fourteen. I had never worn a bra, or shaved my legs. I remember panic-buying a razor before I could possibly be seen on the beach with these “normal teenagers”. I was shocked back into the realities of social circles and status, and drifted from friend group to friend group for most of high school, struggling to fit in anywhere, a swirling concoction of rage and sadness constantly pooling in my belly.
I learned to unravel my inner wild child and become palatable instead, in order to be accepted, to belong. Rejection was a quick and brutal teacher on the path of becoming less weird, less “out there”. And I’ve donned that cloak well, often even proudly, as I’ve navigated through adulthood.
I learned to be smart, to achieve, and that my worth and value - and even lovability - were tied up in that achievement. I learned to prioritize other peoples’ needs and desires over my own. I learned to fit in - even if it meant abandoning parts of myself.
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