A punch in the face (literally)
Welcoming my teenage self to my inner child circle.
TW: Violence
I’ve been punched in the face.
I don’t mean this metaphorically.
I’ve been close-fisted, socked in my face, over and over again, on two different occasions, with two different opponents.
Both times, I clearly remember that first crack of a knuckle hitting me and how everything goes dark after that point. I don’t remember pain. I do remember the audiences that encircled us. The sharp clarity around punch two or three that the cheering was not actually for me (or her)—it was just a pack of wild teenager’s calling for us to tear each other apart. For us to entertain them.
In both fights, I was overpowered within an instant and the consequences stretched well beyond my fractured cheekbones and blackened eyes, including school suspensions and drug testing. The shame was like a weighted blanket that made my already stooped shoulders hang a little heavier than usual, though I never would have let my peers know that.
Despite my lack of skills, I clung to the archetype of fighter. I was “hard.” You can see it in the pictures from that time. My refusal to smile. My death stares at any family member who dared point a camera lens in my direction. The irony now, right?
For a long time, whenever I did inner child meditations, my teenage self never came into mind. She didn’t need me. She didn’t need anyone.
I could easily imagine myself as a toddler and throughout my elementary school years, but this version was so hard to access.
This changed after having children. I quickly saw beyond the facade of hardness. I might have looked angry in every picture, I might have done outrageous things (*quick side note: my self-forgiveness journey was helped immensely when I learned about our front lobe development [or rather, lack thereof in teenagers]), but I was actually far from tough.
I was terrified and I was sad. My mom’s drinking had escalated. She was moments away from hitting her bottom. My dad was ever-absent, traveling often. My siblings were long gone from the house, deep into their adulthoods, most living in faraway cities.
I thought I was ready to be an adult, too. My eyes were painted heavily with black liner and thick mascara. I lived off Marlboro Medium cigarettes and vending machine vanilla lattes.
I thought I wanted the freedom of adulthood.
It took me becoming a mom to see that I was really just a scared little girl desperate to be held.
Today, whenever I do my inner child meditation, teenage Sarah sits sullenly next to me. Chain-smoking and picking at her finger nail polish. She says she doesn’t want to be there, but I know she's grateful to be.
The more I invite her to be apart of this sacred circle of past selves, the less I find myself defaulting to hardness whenever I feel threatened.
The softer we are both becoming.
Healing those parts of us is two-fold - it's for us and helpful for when our littles get to that age. Imagine the compassion and space you'll have for them in a few years because your healing now <3 Let me tell you, buckle up! Raising teenagers is something else lololol
I also manufactured a hard shell as a teenager. One of my nicknames was the “ice queen” and this was long before Frozen 😂When I was a senior in high school I printed out a sheet with a bunch of questions on it and gave it to all my friends to fill it out. I wanted them all to write what they really thought about me and I promised them I wouldn’t open the envelope with all their answers until 10 years after we graduated. When I opened it up 10 years later I was shocked to read one person’s response who was one of my friends but not in my closest circle. I’d lost touch with her by that point. But she saw right through me back then and wrote about how she recognized that I was putting up a tough front and that I was really quite soft inside and she saw me for who I truly was.