Two Things Can Be True - A Return To My Younger Self

I have a good relationship with my inner teenager. She's even shown up in Iris training videos. She's funny, she's intense. She pretty much always thinks about how she could burn it down, wreak havoc, and expose people for who they really are. She hates uneven power dynamics. But the part of me I've been sitting with lately is younger than that. I recently came across a picture of myself at six: it’s a photo of me on the cover of mock-up magazine, posed with one knee on the ground, the other on the soccer ball, a messy ponytail, and a beaming smile. Thinking about that little kid feels differently now that I have an eight-year-old of my own.

This girl was curious. She was prone to getting lost in projects. She was vibrant. She was mostly the little girl captured in this picture, which was taken the year she fell in love with soccer. She was happy most of the time, and now I can't help but to also feel so sad when I look at her. There was so much going on below the surface in her life. Her parents were not getting along. Now, as I know more about mirror neurons, epigenetics, and the mother-daughter bond, I wonder if part of it is just the residual feeling of my mother's sadness from that time.

I have done EMDR on lots of moments from this time period, and I generally look back at my childhood as being happy. I know that I was loved. There were people around me to support me. I had a favorite dog. I was supported in pursuing what I loved.

And yet I look at this picture and am reminded that healing, growth, and figuring out who we are meant to be are part of an ongoing process. It's one that deserves regular re-evaluation, regular reflection, and regular pause, because while recently, I feel sadness, sometimes I look at this picture and feel joy.

I caught myself saying in a session today, "Two things can be true at once," and this hits me now as I look at this little girl. So many things were true for her at once. But at 6 or 8, that concept doesn’t make sense. She was happy. Life was good. And in my body, I know that parts of me even then knew that wasn’t the whole truth. 

I'm curious if my intense love of soccer would have been the same had home not been sad; had home been more together time, more collective. Soccer gave me an escape and a team. It gave me a place where pain had purpose. And when my anger started to threaten other things that mattered to me, it always brought me back to myself and reminded me that all of me could belong somewhere. 

As my daughter begins to explore the ideas of playing this amazing game, I notice so many emotions, thoughts, hopes, and dreams swirling around. And I come back to this little girl, believing she was on the cover of a soccer magazine, and how much she loved this game, even though she didn’t quite know how to play it yet. Even though she wasn’t very good. Because what soccer offered me was a place where the aspects of me that weren’t welcome in other places could exist and thrive. My pursuit of excellence was adaptive; my hyperfocus and disconnection from pain helped me push limits, experience success, and be creative. 

I’m grateful for the courage of my younger self to pursue something she wasn’t very good at because it was fun and had possibilities. I hope this for my adult self now. That she will tap into the courage to pursue things even if she’s not good at them right away, because she enjoys them. 

I hear people talk about childhood as “those were simpler times”, and of course, in many ways compared to the technology and access to information today, that’s accurate. However, when I look at this girl now, the times, her environment weren’t simple. She just didn’t have the cognitive ability yet to understand what she was noticing, feeling, and absorbing. And it has been reparative to see her reality with duality. 

This is the work: to learn to inhabit the complexity with your whole self present, without trying to oversimplify or pick one or the other. 

As you wander through that, we want to invite you into the collective with us. This is a space that was built to hold all of that, and all of you.

Written by: Laurel Thornton