When I was a young girl, I noticed that disabled and injured people got lots of kind attention. The girl in my class who had polio and leg braces was someone I didn’t particularly like, but I wanted to be friendly, kind, and helpful because I thought maybe the attention she received would rub off on me. I noticed that other girls would put her chair up on her desk at the end of the school day. I went home and used the crutches my mother had bought at the Good Will store as toys to convince the younger girls next door that I had polio and couldn’t straighten my legs. My braces were “on the inside,” I said. Doesn’t that hurt? The girls asked me. Oh yes, I said, very much, and those girls were kind to me, opening doors, offering me cookies, showing me their dolls, and even giving them to me.
One day a friend of mine showed up in school with a cast on her arm. Even the teacher was kinder to Toni, a bit of a troublemaker, giving Toni extra smiles and patting her shoulder. Later at home, I found an elastic ankle brace for sprains and slipped it over my left wrist. At school the next day, I kept my arm bent as if wearing an entire cast and covered the brace with my sweater sleeve. Lining up in the hallway, the teacher walked down the line and bent over me, murmuring, Polly, did you hurt yourself? Are you injured? She saw the tip of the brace peeking out from my sleeve. I blushed and lowered my head, mortified because I was faking for attention, and it had worked. The teacher, who rarely ever noticed me, gently placed a hand on my shoulder and said I could be excused from recess if I wished and that I should be careful. I never wore that brace again because I knew it was wrong to fool people, and I was terrified someone would punish me if they found out. Instead, I internalized the wound and began to see myself as an injured person. People couldn’t see the damage, but I knew it was there and believed that made me unique.
I didn’t realize how I had internalized this message until I was an old woman, sick of the humiliation of self-pity and wondering how to shake it. When I realized where it began, that the seeds were planted in my childhood, I laughed, delighted to know this script I had written and the role I had perfected through the decades could be dropped.
There is nothing wrong with me.
I am one grain of sand among many, like a star in the universe, each one the center of it. We are all the center of the universe, equal and alike, no one more special than the next. Undamaged and perfect.
“God is always in you and you are always in Him.
He and you are one. This is the truth”.
Swami Ramdas