Re-Purposing Pain

Lately I've been thinking about re-purposing pain. As I have stated more than once before, I feel as though I am meant to work with children because of the things I went through with my peers. It has occurred to me that one of the best ways to heal my childhood self and to have more love and compassion for my childhood self, is to aid other children through similar struggles. The more I recognize myself in them, the more I can do to help them and by helping them, I'll be healing myself of the intense feelings of injustice felt at that time in my life. Of course, now that I'm older, I can see some of them as smaller injustices than they had seemed at the time but I can still get so riled up about these incidents anytime I mention them that it's as if they all happened yesterday. However, when I don't discuss it for years, they all recede back into the recesses of my mind and I end up convinced that it's all been forgiven and forgotten. Some of them have been entirely forgotten and blocked out. For instance, I can't remember a thing about 4-H camp but my sister remembers having a hard time there too so it must have been a crazy time.

I remember someone starting a conversation with me during class and then the teacher called me out and had me look up "respect" in the dictionary during recess since I was talking while she was talking. So when in middle school, someone handed me a note in class, I did not hand one back for fear of a recurrence. During a science class in second grade, my group wanted me to get the ingredients for the experiment but they weren't going to let me do anything else. The teacher asked my group-mates what the problem was but never got my side of the story. I had told them that I'd get the ingredients if they let me participate in the experiment yet the teacher never bothered to ask me. I ended up furiously dashing across the room for the supplies and accidentally spilling one of the harmless chemicals onto the carpet.

In fourth grade, there was an intense Jeopardy game (Maryland edition) and we were put into teams to learn specific, yet seemingly random facts about the counties in MD and the county I got was Garrett. I worked for hours each day with my parents until I had the pages of facts memorized forwards and backwards. When the Jeopardy like game started I learned pretty quickly what the pattern was. The spokesperson for my team never selected the Garrett County category until it was the last one left and even then, someone else answered the question. I was foiled yet again in attempting to prove that I wasn't brainless.

These are the types of things that need healing in my life and these are things I am certain are happening every day all over the place. If I can play my part in preventing events like that by teaching children respect and encouraging teachers to get both sides of every incident so they don't risk outraging the child they're effectively ignoring. It's a bit demeaning to not bother asking what's going on in the mind of the troubled child. Just because it's not obvious to the observer, doesn't mean there isn't a solid reason for a child's disruptive behavior. Anyway, the point is, if I work with children and my compassion for them grows day by day, that means that my compassion towards myself will also grow. I'll understand my childhood self better and better the more I work with struggling children. Even those who are doing the ostracizing will help me forgive my peers because I'll understand that side a bit better. Understanding and forgiveness do not equate to condoning but it does make the space for healing to take place.