A cool, windy Monday morning in the world... watching the kids play in the school playground right outside my window. These kids have so many toys available to them in that school. They have these little wooden houses to hide in, footballs, skipping ropes, and all sorts of toys they can pick up from a giant colored chest in a corner to play with... they even have a gardening patch in one corner and I'm just watching 5 year-olds watering some sort of shrub.
We never had anything back in my own days. There was just one massive playground with a football pitch and I'm not even sure if we were allowed to play ball outside of sports classes. We used to bring our own 'toys' though, like skipping ropes. The old game that is still in vogue in most primary schools has to be the one where kids hold one end of the skipping rope each while a third one skips over it time and time again. Well, that was a girls' game, really. You would never catch a boy play it or else he would probably be bullied by the other boys laughing at him for playing a 'girly' game.
I remember rarely joining in for such games; instead, I prefered to invent a story or adventure and then cast members of my crew to play it, much like a role playing game. I was always the heroine, obviously... The one I remember strikingly was called 'Super Star', but it sounds way cooler in French ("super etoile") where there isn't the double meaning to the world 'star' as you have in English. I mean, 'star' can now mean a star in the nightsky, or a celebrity of some sort... My meaning of star was of course attached to the nightsky - etoile.
Super Etoile was the name of the heroine, a girl from another world who had landed on Earth and was trying to escape some dangerous creatures who wanted to prevent her from getting back to her world and steal her powers. I remember how I actually pretended that I had read the story in a book when really I was making it up as we went along... I knew that if I had just said 'hey, let's play a game I invented', the kids would be instantly put off by it, but as soon as you validated your idea by saying 'hey, I read this really fun story', then suddenly everyone wanted to play it. I was really good at making stuff up, especially when dealing with gullible people who just take your word for it without much questioning. I was under 8 years old at the time for sure, because once I turned 8, everything changed when the teachers began to bully me. But right before that, I used to come up with all sorts of games and I was kind of playing the part of the ring leader... the boss?
I had so little understanding of the outside world's 'rules' and lived so much in my own fantasy world that apparently I spent my time feeding my imagination picking ideas from what I was observing around me and that happened to please me for some unfathomable reason. At a very young age, the one thing that seemed to have a lot of influence on me was without a doubt television and all the cartoons and movies for children I was watching. I think for a long time I actually believed that what they showed you on TV was an exact version or copy of how it worked in reality. It's the contrast between idealised or cliche visions they depicted in movies, and the reality I lived in, that disturbed me greatly at first.
When I was around 4 years old, I apparently loved to watch Little House on TV, mainly because it presented such a different version of the 'family' from mine. There was a father and mother, and several siblings, and they all loved one another so much, blah blah blah... It kind of appealed to my budding idealistic side, I suppose. When I noticed that they used to pray at the table, I decided to re-enact the habit in my own reality. So... I would go for lunch at school and I would start praying at the table and telling the kids to follow my lead... The issue was that French schools are secular and you are not allowed to express any religious faith inside them. The funny thing was that my 'praying' had nothing to do with religion... I was just re-enacting what I'd seen in that TV series without understanding the religious side of it at all... but the school took it very seriously when I refused to stop doing it and even called my mother to talk to her about it. When she learned what I'd been doing, she was shocked. She had to assure the teachers that really, I wasn't being brought up in any religious manner whatsoever, but that I probably picked up the idea from something I'd watched. After that, she explained to me why I couldn't just pray at the table for the sake of it at school, and I stopped doing it. Mind you, I'm sure that by then I had other things to try that rubbed a few feathers the wrong way, especially with the adults.
All this often leads me to feel like a different person from the one I started off as... When I look at pictures of myself aged under 8, it's like staring at a completely different version of I. It leads me to try and imagine how that little girl would have turned out to be if it weren't for life's circumstances coming into play so strongly that they forced a completely different way of shaping my self. But... would that original, untouched version of I have been better? I was too strong, too fierce and ruthless, in a way, caught up in my own vision of things and perhaps today that version of I would be extremely successful in some field or other, but it may have lacked in humanity. It's hard to say, really... One can only vaguely conjecture, here. The fact remains that as a rule of thumb, what we start off as is too often replaced by a variant of our self, and I wonder what happens when someone such as myself, begins the journey of incorporating the original version of I back into the one shaped by circumstances and society's influences.
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