I didn’t smiled much as a child or as a teenager. I feel as if I’ve been catching up on all the smiling that I didn’t do, now, as an adult. It’s a strange experience because I always thought that children had more reasons to smile more than adults – after all children had not learned much fear or mortality.
Someone had told me that I was empathic. I soaked up other people’s emotions like a sponge. I felt what they were feeling, and sometimes that kept me down for a long time. Since I was young I had been thinking about all the suffering in the world, and I wondered why this was so. As a child I was quiet and hardly spoke. I was obedient, thinking too much, and in my own world.
When I was in kindergarten I realized I had no one to turn to. My dad was always away for business so it was just my mom, my brother, and me. My brother was often sick as a child and required a lot of attention.
One day after kindergarten I had an accident. A big kid on a bicycle sped by as I was walking home with a buddy and hit me. The big kid hurriedly got back onto his bike and fled. I was bleeding from the knees where I fell hard on the gravel. My walking buddy was scared, but I was feeling more of something else than pain from the injury. I got up and brushed myself off. Then I started crying.
I couldn’t stop crying. I leaned against the nearby lamp post and cried. I still don’t understand why I cried so hard then, although I knew it was not from the pain of my knees. My walking buddy begged me to stop crying and that he would walk me home. I wouldn’t budge. I didn’t want to go home because that was not where I found comfort.
After a long time, I finally moved away from the lamp post. My walking buddy and I walked to where I lived. When my mother answered the door, my walking buddy told her I was hurt from the accident with a bicycle. I was grateful that my walking buddy did not abandon me and walked all the way home with me (we usually parted at the street corner where I would walk to my house and he would walk the other way to his house).
That wound slowly healed too.
