“
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain, can experience itself as anything less than a god”
When I was a child, I had a extraordinarily clear, very acute sense of complete disembodiment. I was completed enthralled, fascinated, intrigued, confused, and then ultimately a little frightrened by it. I remember being in the bathroom alone one time, I was nude because I was about to get in the bath, and I had to stop and sit down because I was feeling it so clearly, and so viscerally on that day, and in that moment. Viscerally, lol. As though you can even feel in your body, that you never had that body before. But I knew it, and I felt it, and then, even at the age of 7, I paid so very much attention to try to carefully see if I could identify this feeling as anything more familiar to me. I tried to watch and wait and see if it would pass, or if maybe it was a fleeting, momentary sense of
something - rather than an inbuilt reality. I tried to examine in my child’s mind if it was an idea i had, rather than something i was experiencing/living.
Finally I had to discard my own attempts at rationalization, because it was so clear to me, in such a concrete and
crystalline way, that I was feeling something that was coming NOT from
me, and not out of me, and also not from
my inside, but from something outside of me. Something that was indescribable for me then and now, and something that was unfathomably larger. The feeling and the realization, put another way, is that I knew in every cell of my being, that
I didn’t come from me.
The feeling of disembodiment i think must have crescendoed, because it got so strong that day in the bathroom that i had to sit down. Sitting down, i then looked down at the skin on my bare arms, and then I held them out in front of me, first stretched out in front of me with the backs of my hands facing up, then slowly I turned then over and looked at my arms again with my palms facing upwards. And the force of the reality of my clear realization that not only was I
not of my own body, but that
before, I had
not been so at all - was A LOT for me to take in by myself.
But this time it was so much more powerful than anything else I had ever felt before in my life - that I gathered up my courage and left the bathroom to go find my mother, and I told her I had to tell her something that I had been feeling for a long time, but which in the bathroom just then had become so clear to me that I needed to tell her - because I understood something about myself that I never knew or understood before.
She listened for a bit, and then said to me “
children shouldn’t think about such things”. I was shocked into complete stillness and silence, by this complete brick wall of a dismissal. Without even one iota of care, or interest, or even a
sentence or simple acknowledgment.
Anything that could have maybe helped me to be able to try to frame for myself, or to start to assimilate, something that was completely immutable - but which I also didn’t yet even have the full vocabulary for. I wanted/needed so much to have a real conversation, about the most real thing I had ever felt in my life until then. Isn’t it great being a child!
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