Love Letters to Anne

So anyway, I was unhappy at my core, but I tried to fit in, trying to be everything everyone expected of me. Dealing with situations with no guidance or directions, no map, and yet this longing filled my being. I couldn’t behave because the emptiness would suck the life out of me and the slow twisting of insanity growing within me would explode out of me. I couldn’t control it. I would act out, and in violence at times, never shying away from a battle of anyone’s creation.

And everything was a battle. I remember for example, the day I figured out finally how to tie my own shoe out on the playground by myself. I was angry no one showed me how, and my peers were distant from me. I wasn’t like other kids. Different. So I was isolated, and eventually would just withdraw and self isolate, I spent years early on to myself, I was aware of the things around me, but didn’t trust anyone or anything. I got very good, very early, at being situationally aware. It was a trauma response. I was hyper observant and always working it out. Who I was with, what they were doing, were they successful? Could I do whatever they were doing?

I read constantly. At one point, we had two sets of encyclopedias, a blue set and a white set. Hardcovers. Probably pretty expensive, (they were always in some financial bind because of poor resource management) but I can recall going to the bookshelf one day, allured by the smell of the leather covers. I pulled out and opened the book and was amazed at the things I saw. Was this stuff true? Could I trust facts? Like the dictionary I would read to understand the grownups, I now had discovered a window into the world. The moving parts of the machine. All I needed now was to figure out how the parts fit together. I read the dictionary and both sets of the encyclopedias covers to covers. So, I began to educate myself and familiarize myself with the world. My immediate world was fairly simple, but it was out there, somewhere, I had a real family. I had a real mom. I was going to learn about this place, and then go and find them wherever they are.

It consumed me. I was always evaluating everything for whether it served my purpose. If it wasn’t useful, I disregarded the distraction. I was frustrated at the length of the process of learning. Patience was never a thing I’ve been good with because we aren’t here forever so I’m not playing: just tell me the time, don’t tell me how to make the watch. I’m on a mission.

Now this, it seems to me to have been an advantage, this outlook. The fact that I had a mission, and now had pieces of a puzzle of life in general, (and by extension in personal) kept me sharper from most of my peers whom I had been observing as well. I had to learn, as we all do, how to socialize. But again, no one said go introduce yourself, say hi and smile…but even if they had I was a cautious child. Staying to myself. Content to a degree to take advantage of what these people thought was necessary to learn for navigating this place. I was coming out of the shell shock and getting focused. My peers were consumed with distractions and entertainment. My entertainment was filled with the complex inner-workings of adult dramas. I was putting it together, albeit slowly.

We were a Navy family. We moved around a lot. Sometimes we moved twice in a year. People and things would come and they would go. There was nothing permanent, nothing felt stable.

Except change. Change was changeless. I saw this early and learned to adapt. Adapt or die child, adapt or die.