Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found Read Free Page B

hand, saw myself as clumsy and lumbering, dreamy and messy, too sporty. I tried to be what I thought my mother wanted me to be, but I knew deep down that I wasn’t. For as long as I could remember I had felt like I had to be someone different from who I was. And I was sure, even at seven, that I just wasn’t good enough. I was sneaky, and I lied, and, even if other people didn’t realize it, I knew that I wasn’t a good girl.
    Where do we get these ideas about ourselves? In my practice as a psychotherapist, I see people every day who are still trapped in the patterns that they learned when they were young, the things that they believed about themselves as children remaining with them every day. I knew that there were differences between my mother and me, and because I so desperately wanted to be like her, I was sure that every difference was a fault.
    When I turned eight, my mom threw me a doll party. This must have been her idea, because I was not one of those girls who carried her dollies everywhere. But once she said it, all I wanted was a Cabbage Patch doll for my birthday, and they were sold out everywhere. That was at the height of the insane Cabbage Patch craze, and they were impossible to find. Of course, Melissa had one of the preemies, the most sought-after Cabbage Patch dolls of all. She brought it to my party, carrying it like a real baby and looking darling in her pretty dress sprinkled with tiny little flowers. There were doll centerpieces, doilies, and Cabbage Patch plates and napkins, all as girly as could be. This was not the party I would have chosen, but I did my best to play the part. My mom came to the table and taught us lullabies to sing to our dolls. The irony was that while the other girls had their little dolls, I hadMontgomery Moose, Daniel’s favorite stuffed animal from the Get Along Gang. My mother sang in her beautiful voice, and all the little girls loved it, except me. There is a home video of this event, which shows Melissa holding her baby in just the right way, gently stroking her perfectly swaddled little preemie as she sings sweetly to her. I am sitting at the head of the table in a big chair that Danny is sharing with me, looking off somewhere, not paying much attention to the goings-on, Montgomery Moose resting listlessly in my arms. Danny had a Western-themed party. I had more fun at his.
    I wasn’t a particularly smart child, but what I lacked in intelligence, I made up for with my imagination. I had such an active world in my head. I know now that when my teachers said that I was a daydreamer or had my head in the clouds, some of that must have been because I couldn’t see or hear them as well as I should have. Still, they weren’t wrong. I liked my imaginary world much more, because I could be anyone that I wanted to be. I could take all of the things that I thought were wrong with me and replace them with beautiful ones. I would do this when falling asleep at night, because I was terribly afraid of the dark and suffered from nightmares. For years I slept in Daniel’s room, because I had seen
Friday the 13th
at a friend’s house when I was far too young and refused to sleep alone. Then I taught myself a trick where I would replay the same happy story again and again in my head until I fell asleep. When I was young I would fantasize about dancing as Clara from
The Nutcracker,
and as I got older I would imagine that a boy whom I liked was about to kiss me, and as soon as he leaned in toward me, I’d replay the scene over and over, until I was asleep.
    My imagination was not exclusive to my dreams. I spent years of my childhood telling lies that I’d created so vividly in myhead that even I believed them. They were never malicious, and as a young child I mostly told them to avoid getting in trouble, but they came easily.
    As I got older, my lies became more elaborate, and, like dominoes set up one after another, each one led to more lies as I tried to cover them up. They