My childhood part 1

I rush here and I rush there and up and down and everything is a blur. I feel like I have no time to write between schoolwork and housework. So I write down notes, short drafts and such. In the end they clutter and make me feel even more like I can't write anymore so I basically put everything aside and sat down to write right now. Of all the notes and scribbles I've made of musings and reflections on spirituality, society at large, scientific theories and ideas, poems and prose. All of these jumbled together into an conglomeration as well as an effective writing clog. I sit down and can't feel nothing else to come to mind but to complain about people, human beings and coming back to add here after more than a few paragraphs down this will probably have a sequel to tie it together.

I've written at some point or the other about it but this writing block preys on me and it feeds on my frustrations. Wow that almost made it sound sentient... maybe it is!

At any rate yes people. I had a different childhood to keep it simple and as such I kept to myself, watched the other children at times but mostly wandered off to whatever wilderness I could find to catch lizards and play with bugs. The empathy i have with animals of any size or lifeforms in general I developed in my childhood and from then to this day. Most kids like to play all the time with other kids and get attention. I simply didn't, I enjoyed going down a steep mound into a bamboo forest and parting only with it when the bell for class rang. My playmates were black and orange ladybugs, green lizards, black spiders, worms, trees, bamboo, rocks. There I played pretend, there I enjoyed the strange alien feel of scales and insect legs when I caught the creatures who scared everyone else. I'd make "buildings" out of sticks and rocks given them a rough idea like sticks stuck into the ground in a circle of a cairn of rocks.

The place was dark, the bamboos let some rays of sunlight in which i enjoyed playing with the beams though I remember that the sun hurt my eyes when i finally got out of my journeys. I was a strange child to others, not shunned because I could catch lizards and grasshoppers and I could speak of animals I had learned of from my books and isolation to their awed delight. Yet I was never a leader, I wasn't picked first or second or third for games, I was made fun of by older kids and others were quick to join in, I simply didn't like to talk and just talk as much as everyone else did. I was for my pale skin, bad socializing skills and strange habits subtly marginalized.

I didn't mind at all I had enjoyed my journeys into the creaking bamboo forests more than trying to fit in before any feeling of displacement happened. I would play pretend with the bugs and the lizards and the trees, I would pretend I was one of them and wonder what it would be like to be a tall tree or an agile lizard I wanted to know what that was like more than I wanted to be human with all their brutish cruelness, I remember even back then I thought the insults they called each other didn't make sense to me, and demands for what they called "normality". Those demands are what shattered my fey world and its why I feel protective towards children when i see bad parents doing the same. I guess its something we all go through but some parents tell their kids not to touch animals that are obviously harmless like a snail for example, not to touch rocks and plants, to not be loud or to run, not to play with anything that isn't some mentally blunting, socially moulded plastic thing. Most kids however are quick to accept it I didn't, I spent my childhood wanting to be a lizard and a wolf and sometimes a tree. Past the demands for me to play with other children, to comb my hair to the side, to not get my striped polo shirts and pretty shoes dirty and to be normal I clung fiercely to my fey world of creatures I studied and understood.

I am on a roll here aren't I? Lets skip forward a bit. So yes eventually the demands turned to forcing and I was ripped away not without a deep imprint left in me. I changed schools, no green just a sun baked hell with a basketball court and an ugly playground of seesaws and jungle gyms, well i though they were ugly everyone else loved them then again none of them saw the magic of nature as I did and do.

No animals, no forests so resigned I was trampled over into the masses to be stamped out into what every parent seems to want, a normal healthy successful professional whatever it takes. So I took what I learnt from my time in the shadows of the forests and the lore of the beasts and turned it with what I found myself surrounded by, people. There in the 2nd grade I realized the truth was uglier than the I assumed by distancing myself and blocking it out.