Reconciliation

How do we turn out to be the people we are? Do we transform gradually, as a result of habitual actions or do big, defining moments weigh in more? I’ve always felt a deep dissonance between my life as a child and my life right now, and I’ve longed to find a way to blend these two versions of myself, to find a middle ground between the things I wanted to do as a child and the things I consider important now. 

I wanted to be creatively unhindered, I wanted to try my hand out at EVERYTHING without worrying about what each of these activities was going to lead to (or if it would lead to anything at all). I wanted to give up, hobby after hobby, interest after interest without worrying about the consequences. Some days, I wanted to be bored and sleep all day, others, I wanted to stay up all night playing. But today, I want to be accountable, to be consistent. I want to keep at it, to work hard, but not without being free or having fun. 

Being a kid is fun, it’s safe, but it’s still as real and tangible an experience as adulthood. The joy, the tears and worries and anxieties – they’re all the same, equally urgent and consequential. The reaction these emotions garner in these two stages of life are however, a tad bit contrasting. One is met with concern and sympathy, while the other is oftentimes trivialised, not as a result of any malice though. Perhaps by virtue of them being small and having decades of learning and experimenting to still go through, children are often dismissable.

I vividly remember wanting to be taken seriously as a child and trying my hardest to validate what I was feeling to everyone around me. This need to not only express your concerns but also justify why they needed to be taken seriously was draining, and being a hyper-sensitive kid didn’t help either.

Let me make clear that I’ve had a wonderful childhood, I’ve been showered with an endless supply of love, support and ice-cream and I’m only grateful and thankful for it (especially for the ice-cream), but I get the feeling that that this sense of not being taken seriously and sometimes even being overlooked is more of an internal dialogue and sensation rather than an outwardly experience for a child.

Of course, in hindsight, most of the things that stressed me out were frivolous, but in that moment, it was my life, and thus, significant. I know now that bullying my mother with tears to allow me to wear my chocolate-stained yellow dress to that wedding was a bad idea, but back then, it was a life and death situation and I needed to make known to everyone that this tattered yellow dress was the centre of my universe. 

There are multitudes of emotions that children don’t necessarily know how to emote or put in words. I for one, couldn’t tell fear from worry or sadness from anger (I still can’t tell indigestion from anxiety but that’s a story for another day). 

Around the time I was 18, I began to become fascinated with children’s books. They were unlike the books I read as a child, they were deeply meaningful, beautifully illustrated, and more than anything, real. They spoke to children with honesty, and almost had an adult-like quality to them. My favourite was Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, a book about dealing with loss and sadness. “Everyday I try to do something I can be proud of. Then, when I go to bed, I think very very, very hard about this one thing” Rosen wrote, and I think he changed my life at 18 and I can only imagine how much more adept I would be at managing my emotions had this book come to me a decade earlier than it did.

So I took all these lessons learnt from my newly acquired children’s books and put them into actions a couple of years later when I spent some time teaching kids at a shelter in Mumbai. I interacted with these kids like I would with any adult, had conversations about what they considered important, and while sometimes, the energy of 15 ten-year-old boys would drive me insane, sometimes, I had really insightful conversations with them, conversations I wish someone would have had with me when I was ten.

Last week, I found a bunch of drawings these kids had made for me on my last day with them, something to remember them by and I spent the rest of the day wondering where these kids were now, what they were doing, and if they’d recognise me if I ever went to see them again.

So, while reminiscing how much fun I had with these kids, and in an attempt to reconcile my childhood and and my life as an adult, I took these drawings with their innocent optimism, and gave them a peak at adulthood, a time when you’re taken seriously, when you’re in control, when sometimes all you can think of is being a child again, and surprisingly enough, they fit just fine. Here it was, in these pictures, something I’ve been looking for for so long, for the perfect balance, for reconciliation.