Looking for Early Clues

Looking back to find clues of my empathic nature in my childhood is difficult.  My early memories are fragmented; visual clips with hints of audio, like a dvd that skips through a chapter of a movie.  Some images are clear while others are distorted or hazy.  Interpretation and understanding comes only from stories and explanations related by others who were there, my sisters,  parents or friends.  But even then the “memories” aren’t mine, they are “as told by” memories.

I suppose the fractional grasp on my childhood is a result of feeling my way through life.  As an adult, I approach experiences and events with a critically analytical mind, paying attention to detail and evaluating them, committing them to memory.  But as I child I was described (especially in the “comments” section on report cards!) as a “day-dreamer”,  someone who spent most of her time in her own world, relating to others in reality only when necessary.  “An overly emotional child who seems incapable of separating her thoughts from her feelings and therefore struggles with staying focused on what’s right in front of her”, one teacher observed.  I remember that teacher, her face.  Older than it probably needed to look, with sad and tired eyes.  But that is all I remember.  I do not recall the classroom, the lessons, the books we read.  Only her face and drooping shoulders remain with me today.  And the words she wrote describing me.  And there are so many more like her; faces floating around my head connected to emotions I had no reason to feel and experiences I had never lived.  I wonder if her perception of me was accurate…that I was a day-dreamer, dwelling within the contents of whatever happy fantasy I created for myself to escape the limbic bombardment emanating from those around me.  If that was, indeed, me, if I only half participated in reality, then it is no wonder that my memories are incomplete.

The piecemeal history I call my past is a frustrating basis from which to start an investigation of my present. But slowly, as I gain more experience and wisdom, some of the haze begins to clear, and while the memories do not resurface, perception and realization from the intuitive intelligence I do have provide satisfying insight.