Childhood Traumas

Life is a string of millions of events though these events keep happening and we hop on from one to another and mostly not storing or keeping a memory of atleast 99% yet there are very few prominent ones which get stored in the core of our being. The good experiences help us create a positive outlook of world the bad ones haunt us. And the worst ones are the ones which happen to us in the childhood because at that stage we are not capable of comprehending or make sense of them through logic or reasoning. They just get registered as is and since they’re very much present in our root memory they haunt us in different ways and become a significant unseen driver to our reactions. Let me tell you this through personal story which I very recently identified as a childhood trauma.

So this must be year 1991-1992 and my vague memory suggests I was still in junior school because I remember sitting on the wooden chair and not on a wheelchair. Basically, every morning my Dad used to drop me at school and used to settle me on my wooden chair placed with the first table in the middle row right under the nose of the teacher and when the school used to get over my Mom would come and pick me from that chair and head back home. Yes, all those hours in the school I used to sit on that stationary chair with nowhere to go or move, not even washroom. If someday I feel the pressure in my bladder I will control the urge to pee until I reach home post school or on the rarest of the days when things got uncontrollable school authorities would ask my parents to take me home. And no, this is not the memory that haunts me but these hardships helped me evolve and made me stronger. Ok, let’s come to the main event of our story.

I used to carry a water bottle but that would mostly get finished by mid-day and either the school staff or a caring classmate would fill it for me but that day something happened that I couldn’t ever imagined. So around the lunch time my water bottle was empty and I asked one of my classmate to fill it for me or give me a glass of water. Since it was the recess time and teacher wasn’t there and you know how kids behave in the recess like they were freed from the jail. So in that moment of mischief and excitement he opened his pants, urinated in the glass and poured on my head. And, I particularly remember that in that moment my mind went numb because a kid of that age just don’t know how to comprehend what had just happened with him. I don’t remember all the details after that but I remember my sticky hair and how I kept my strength in school but as I got home that day I cried to Mom. Though she pretended strong in front of me to help me get over and move on in that moment but she too must have cried when I wasn’t present.

That day passed, years passed and we grew up and evolved, that classmate even became a good friend even today he is and I’m sure he would not even remember this happened. But in one of the meditation sessions lately these visuals from the past started playing in my head like this event happened just yesterday and that’s when I realized I have never gotten over this and somewhere have been keeping this along. When I started analyzing I could relate to it because even until now I can’t just trust and fallback completely on anyone. I would tell people I trust them but secretly I would have my guards on and also sometime the bouts of unexplained anger I would have.

But 30 years later when I am looking at it again I am able to look at it from a distance and from this distance I see the naughtiest kid of the class doing something, not with the intent of hurting me or even knowing if it can hurt me but he was just doing it for a moment of fun. And, now when I look at that kid I’m not angry or hurt but I have empathy for him and forgiveness for that moment in our history.