How My Big Head Slowed Me Down

I was a shy little kid—actually I was more than shy. I was introverted to the point where if someone spoke directly to be, my body would tense up like a surf board, and my heart would send Morse code through my chest: “SOS.” My mind had its own agenda, rattling off messages to the tune of, “Whatever you do, do not say that, because you will look like more of an idiot than you do already.” So I did nothing. I remember these distressing occurrences more in Junior High when kids are especially not so nice. Besides the whole shy thing, I was a big girl (I hate the word “fat”) during these difficult years. Packing on an extra sixty-five pounds left me even more vulnerable to the caustic remarks of my peers. (“Poor me!”) As a way to keep others from “getting” to me, I adopted a stance of superiority. Since, I had not allowed myself to communicate with them, I had built for myself, a comfy fortress of self-righteousness. The ego has gotten a bad rap from psychologists and metaphysicians, but it sure did save me at the time. Beliefs had built up in my consciousness about others and me that had caused a transformation in the way I interacted as a human being.

After a search of definitions for transformation on the website, I discovered many of them to be on the biological side of this question. A common definition goes something like this: “when a healthy cell goes through the process of becoming a malignant cell, a transformation has taken place.” Looked at this way, I suppose one could also claim transformation takes place when the cancerous cell goes through the steps to become a healthy cell. In other words, a person (or cell) once transformed, becomes something else.

Separatism had taken hold of me by the time I reached my first year of High School, and I did feel like a different person. My ego had become my friend, and I fed it on purpose. The journey to peel away my protective layers would take more years than it had taken to grow in the first place. Protection, took the form the isolation. Dualism became a natural, if unconscious, way of living. I didn’t like or trust people very much. I was right, and they were wrong.