Somewhere between the ages of five and eight most of us lose the sense that we are magical — that this whole experience is magical.
We forget that we are the magic.
We become separate, we begin to develop an identity.
My inner child grew up fast and grew up hard — by the time he was 5.
My inner child…
Is a mean little fucker.
Is a hurt little person.
Is not trusting of others.
Was trained to live in fear.
Was shown the very worst in people.
Had to learn how to navigate the monsters by himself.
In order to deal with this experience, my inner child became a monster
My inner child sees the love and the beauty in the world.
My inner child cherishes the wonderment of how it could be and laments how it ought to have been.
My inner child recognized the world is both light and dark and the determining factor is always the people involved.
What has become of my inner child is my responsibility.
My inner child is still, on occasion, a mean little fucker. Trained like an assassin to protect me and mine. Fuck with him while my current inner adult isn’t on the ball and he’ll dismantle you in ways hard to put back together.
My inner child is my responsibility. My inner child has mostly become ok, healed I think is the term the cool kids have been using the last few years… Kintsugi1 is a good way to think about it I suppose.
In these last 40 some years, he has learned that I am trustworthy.
Earning that trust and helping him to put himself back together, to learn to relax, to learn to have fun, to believe that he is good and worthy and cherished, has been a journey.
He has been made safe.
Though he now remembers that this is all magical and that he is the magic, he will never be the same.
He’s a monster, a dragon with skills developed to sense and feel what’s going on behind the scenes, what people are actually about, like a dog, I sense bad people from a mile away.
Being always on guard like that is tiresome, a constant low-level state of high alert. One of the reasons we moved to the end of the world.
Maybe that’s the price for going on this ride. Maybe that’s simply what I needed to become who I was always needed to be.
We all have ours, mines no tougher than yours, it’s simply mine.
Kintsugi, or “golden joinery,” is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, highlighting and celebrating the imperfections rather than hiding them.
Also known as kintsukuroi (“golden repair”), is more than just a repair technique; it’s a philosophy that embraces imperfection and the idea that something can be even more beautiful after being broken.↩