Thank goodness, we carry all of our prior experiences forward, filed deep within our minds, because the composite collage made up of your memories or mine, both good and bad, positive and negative, offer each of us an experiential sense of balance in all things.
On second thought, the statement above does not take into account the unpredictability of memory or the lasting effect of PTSD on the damaged psyches of children who’d been forced to weather traumatic downpours of verbal or physical or sexual abuse, examples of which had appeared in earlier posts and will re-emerge in later posts, whereas today, my intuitive voice is determined to focus on the influencing factor of friendships made, during high school, since routinely, one friendship leads to more just as my newfound friendship with Debbie will have opened a door to a ready-made social life (as mentioned in a previous post).
I have no conscious memory of having been invited to meet with the charter members of this social club composed entirely of freshmen girls. Having been designated an outlier throughout my lonely preteen years, reflection suggests that during that crucial stage of social development, mine would have been delayed to the point that my unexpected inclusion within this popular group had thoroughly dizzied my mind. You see, our freshman class had been made up of hundreds of kids; yet only two girls’ social clubs had come to be, and the fact that I’d been amongst the twenty or so ‘chosen’ to be included within one of two highly select social circles made NO sense, at all, to me …
(Note of caution from writer to reader—upon review, the complexity of thought within these next two paragraphs may be in need of editing for the sake of clarity once my wearied mind has rested.)
Since I’d had no conscious clue of the underlying reason why my cheerful, out-going presence had been purposely ignored whenever party invitations had been mailed to a select group of my classmates (whom I’d longed to befriend me, throughout junior high), my natural bent toward leadership withdrew in favor of having unconsciously embraced the role (foreign to my nature) of follower in hopes of doing whatever it took to ensure that this brand new fragile bubble in which ‘I’d found myself’ surrounded by a set of popular freshman girlfriends, would not pop.
You see, insight—spotlighting the fact that (rather than ‘finding myself’) I’d ‘lost my true sense of self’ in order to ‘fit in’—had escaped my awareness until I’d turned fifty at which time while writing the string of posts, entitled First Kiss, a heart-stopping Aha! moment dawned on me, expanding my subjective (narrow minded) perception of what had actually caused a personable child, like me, to have been cast to the wayside—and that insight proved so utterly flabbergasting as to have left my mind reeling as happens whenever a sudden flash of objectivity illuminates a burst of mental clarity that feels so enlightening as to have reversed everything I had believed to be on target concerning the mind boggling social rejection that had offered my budding self esteem sound reason to shrink up at the tender age of eleven. And as soon as that spotlight of insight had brightened my sense of self awareness, I came to understand the deeply painful misunderstanding that had wounded a popular sixth grade boy, who’d retaliated by furiously wielding his social power amongst our peers to exile me …
👩🏻Annie
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