Being Perceived

Showing my self is something I stopped doing after the day I got called 'Underwear Girl' at my best friends house when I was five years old. I can clearly remember getting dressed that day in my dress and pinafore that my grandmother made me, I loved wearing dresses, and most of them were made by my mom or my grandmom. This outfit didn't fit anymore only because it was too short, but I didn't care. It made me so happy to have on a dress with a pinafore. I felt like myself. See?

Underwear wasn't even on my radar as something bad or wrong or a thing you aren't supposed to see. I remember having underwear with ruffles on the back that went under dresses when I was a toddler, wearing cable knit tights, colored tights, but I don't remember the way my underwear looked when I was a kid. It wasn't important, it was clothes just like shirts were clothes and dresses were clothes.

I can remember feeling so carefree, my dress and pinafore spinning out around me, my legs free to move and bend and jump without the restriction of pants or shorts. My legs wanted to be free. They were strong and powerful and moved me. Convincing my mom to let me wear my too short dress felt like a victory.

But she knew something I didn't: someone would notice and have something to say. She tried to tell me, but I was five. I didn't understand the logic she was working with. It made no sense to me, why would anyone care? Tired of arguing about it, she let me go play- I would find out the hard way.

And I did. I can remember, I've written about it here before, the moment when I was alone and the other kids were together 5 feet from me, one pointing and jeering "Underwear Girl! Underwear Girl!" and my own confusion at what the problem was. I didn't understand why my mom cared about this, or why the other kids did either- weren't they all wearing underwear too? So what if they showed?

I felt seen. Looked at. They saw me and didn't like what they saw.

What is it about finding fault with other people? Who decided that being able to see someone's underwear had so much fucking meaning? Someone somewhere made up the idea that you shouldn't see underwear and in the early 1970's there was definitely a too short idea about skirts and dresses, but I was a kid.

I think about this moment a lot as I put together where the parts of me that manage and protect me came from. This moment is where I realized I was not like the other kids, and I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out why. It seems insignificant- how can something so random and unimportant be so influential in the course of a whole life?

I often wonder what it would have been like to have someone who could have talked to me about it, so when I came home upset I didn't get yelled at and "I told you so". My mom had no idea what to do with me. She was 28 years old and had no clue about how to raise a child. She loved me so much and wanted to protect me but her protection often turned to frustration and anger when I didn't understand grown up ideas about how the world worked. I think she thought I was another adult and I think I did too- two undiscovered AuDHDers trying to manage life.

It was in this experience I learned I did not want to be perceived. Being seen meant teasing and an angry mom. I set out from the house that day a little kid and I went to bed that night changed. I had lived through being the weakest member of the herd, and I knew I had to shut down whatever it was that made me carefree so that wouldn't happen again. Things like this feel like life or death when you are five.

There's a weird thing that happens when I feel perceived- I rarely let people see all the way in because they will want to take away what I find so beautiful about myself- they way I am. The carefree part of me is protected by a powerful five year old kid, and I really want to help her find her way back to being five again. The children parts of me are entirely sick of being adultified.

The fear of a child shouldn't be running the life of a 54 year old. She needs me to see her. To let her play. To wear the dress and pinafore and spin circles in the sunshine without anyone caring that her underwear is showing. She needs me to be the grown up, to stop having her parent me and protect me because that job is way too big for a little kid. She doesn't know how to do it, so she just throws up walls everywhere and stops me from doing so many things. It's not a voice of reason, it's a voice of desperation.

If this sounds a lot like parts work, it is. I have always known I had different parts of me, different people as part of me, different voices that step in and try to direct. Because of Sybil, and the ways our culture tries to pasteurize and homogenize us I kept that idea as another of my own weird secrets, understanding it was here but not giving it credibility because being normal is the most mentally healthy thing you can be...right?

What emerges for me in the field of mental health is that we have pathologized ourselves for far too long. Mental health comes from being curious about the system and self education and self therapy is a big part of that. Our complexities don't make us crazy or unwell- they make us natural, our culture is what shapes our unwellness. I think about the kid who pointed and laughed, called me Underwear Girl, and I know now as an adult looking back he had a tough home life and he was doing what was done to him- othering, ridiculing. We are in a loop of hurt because we lack the ability to stop colonialism and capitalism from looting our humanity. There are so many of us, a world population that rides the edge of collapse because of the cultured scarcity and extraction and power.

I am an idealist. I look at the world and know that my life is one of many lives in the history of the universe. I see how the grabs for power and ownership look tired and stale, like really? Are we still acting like this is the right way to go? No civilization has succeeded in the history of civilizations, and yet we keep pointing at people and calling them Underwear Girl thinking that is what will work. Meanwhile most of us just want to have the resources of connection, shelter, and to be fed- to not live always chasing and fixing and working all the time to collect money as if that is the thing that will actually save us.

It's not. The thing that will actually save us is us. Being an us. Being able to understand that we live in nature and nature isn't fair. Knowing that you can't have a justice system inside a capitalist system. Fair is not how nature works, and we live in a natural world. The idea of fairness contributes to the machine of power because it creates a hierarchy that looks equitable but creates conflict by the very nature of it's goal.

We grasp at reality, want to change it, go back. We are special, and we are nothing. Both are true at the same time. This morning while I was making my bed I somehow got a paint chip jammed under my fingernail from the hinge on the closet door, it hurt and bled and felt so insulting- I'm just trying to make my bed here! And then I remember people are getting bombed right now, and Trump is pooping in a golden toilet and none of it makes sense, but it isn't supposed to.

What is trying to be here is the complexity of life, life as part of nature, not just as humans. The planet we live on creates and composts everything we need. No other species goes to work, has cars, builds supercomputers, has nuclear weapons, hoards money. The comfort we can create from the things that are here and are free, and yet we have made...this.

And this, this is what makes the moment: Underwear Girl. The desire to cull the herd, to make some lives special and some lives disposable, random like nature yet purposeful like humanity. The ways we sort ourselves according to whiteness and wealth is faux evolution masquerading as natural law.

Jeff Bezos is getting married in Venice, I saw a photo of Oprah Winfrey smiling and waving, all the rich people gathering to watch rich people get married and I am embarrassed that I even know about this. People are starving and dying and yet, somehow, these people getting married is where resources are going. A $50 million wedding. It is truly disgusting, and why I think we won't get anywhere until we stop making money the thing that gives us value.

This, to me, is the way we start rebelling. We start understanding the resources that cannot be bought or sold but can be shared. We go back to being communities who aren't on the frantic schedule of the corporations that will never love you back. We get natural, we live in metabolism rather than capitalism.

I am an idealist. If we can build a world of competition and resource hoarding then we can certainly build the opposite. We need to work towards psychological safety rather than putting all our effort into financial safety. The nervous system of the planet is past it's window of capacity, in a perpetual state of fight flight freeze. We could have anything, and so we have...this?

Colonizers be colonizing. What can we be doing? How can this moment in time, in natural time, not machine time, be different? What new systems could emerge from the openings in our psyches? How can we scrape off the layers of civilization and return to nature so we can find ourselves at home again?

I keep thinking about little kid me-bare legs, spinning, underwear showing, not yet ashamed. And I think the thing I can do is let her exist. Not button her up, not shut her down, not tuck her away so people feel more comfortable. She was never the problem.

The systems that taught that boy to make fun of me, to make either of us feel like we're a problem-that’s what I’m done with. I want to live in a way that refuses to exchange self-abandonment for belonging, one that doesn’t flinch when I’m being perceived.