Swimmin'

Last week, I was the Guest of Honor at Annie Farley's Girl Scout Meeting.  I was there to talk about what it was like growing up without an arm and being different from everyone else.  I shared the following story with them that I wrote last year.  It's called Swimmin'.


“So like, do you swim in circles?” he asked, through suspicious eyes.

Sean, my classmate and third grade nemesis, stood before me with his hands on his hips, waiting for my response. “Another recess ruined,” I thought to myself. Just moments ago, I was pushing my friend on the tire swing when Sean and his band o’ buddies sauntered up looking for a target. Like most days, I was the easy bull’s eye.

“Hey, did you hear me? Or are you deaf, too? Do you swim in circles are not?” This time he was much louder. He had my attention, as well as a few bystanders’. His voice was rough and mean and I could tell he hated me, but I wasn't sure why. I wasn't going to back down though.

I bowed my head and scanned the ground, searching for my girlfriend’s tennis shoes, trying to gauge how close she was to me, so that we can take them all on together. I was terrified when I couldn't find them, and glanced up briefly to see her casually chatting with some other girls and wandering off toward the other side of the field.

I pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt down, past the two metal prongs and cables and rubber bands that were my left hand, opened my hook and tucked my sleeve inside, covering up as best I could.

“Because, with only one arm, I bet you just go round and round in the pool, huh?” he said with his minions snickering behind him. They were standing, like a wall, before me. I was trapped in a mean-boy cage. I’d have to face him alone. I took a deep breath, puffed up my chest a bit, raised my head, and looked Sean dead in the eye. I began to speak to firmly, showing no emotion at all to him. Telepathically.

It was a technique I'd seen demonstrated on my favorite show, That's Incredible. Funny, that show baffled me and terrified me at the same time. In one segment, an old man was bending metal spoons with only his brain power. He was also able to send lengthy telepathic messages to his cousin in Albuquerque. The camera zoomed in on the long-distance cousin, with the split screen of the old guy feverishly concentrating, and miraculously, the cousin recounted the message exactly. Incredible!

In the next segment, a frizzy haired woman told of her experiences with an alien abduction. How she’d noticed the flash of the aliens’glowing eyes in the corner of her bedroom and the flashing lights outside her window and she’d known they were there for her, AGAIN.

This show was both interesting and horrifying for me as an eight year old, but I watched it religiously and spent many nights sleeping at the foot of my parents’ bed, convinced that aliens were trying to take me, too.

“Leave me ALONE and Sean! Find someone else to pick on today, you ASS!” I said very firmly in my head. I was still staring him down.

“What? Now you can't talk, too? You got a hook for a hand, your deaf, and you can't speak?” he said.

Oh, I was speaking. “Idiot! You jackass!” I shouted in my head. “You're fat faced jerk!” I screamed, and my brain started to pound. And then, when he didn't show that he had heard me, my telepathic voice in my head became pathetic. “Please?” I whimpered. Then softer, “Please?” My face was hard and stoic. “Dead eyes,” I thought. “Dead eyes don't cry.” From the outside, you'd never know that there were tears behind my eyes.

“You're obviously the death of one, ASS” I said, wondering if he could hear my telepathic slam. I assumed he would've reacted to my responses, had he been in tune with his Extra Sensory Perception. Since he wasn’t phased, I knew I was speaking with someone who had not recognized his psychic potential like I'd seen on TV.

“Was your dad Capt. Hook?” he continued. His wall of follower friends snickered and whispered. My blank face showed him that I was not riled by his questions, though if my hair were not long he can see the burning rage, hatred and bitterness I had for him in my red hot ears.

“Oh holy crap!” I thought. I had also seen a segment on Spontaneous Human Combustion on That's Incredible. One minute a person is just fine, minding his own business, maybe eating a TV dinner in his living room and the next, he has burst into a ball of flames leaving only smoldering shoes and scraps of crisp clothing behind. “Is this how it starts? In the ears?” I wondered. I could hear my heart pounding. My body was talking, along with my head.

“He's a jerk!” said my ears.

“But he's scary, too,” said my throbbing heart.

“Don't let him see. Don't let him know he has any power,” said my head.

Feigning apathy I waited for the next question. “I think I might buckle,” said my knees. “I'm not sure how much longer I can stand here.”

“Give her a minute,” said my head. “She will find her voice.”

This battle and my body raged on. My jaw twitched. My teeth were clenched hard. “Oh my God! I think she's trying to break me,” said my molars.

Ever so seriously in my last ditch effort at ESP I said in my head, “Come closer Sean. Let's find out what my daddy, Captain Hook, taught me about war.”

Suddenly, I heard my mom's voice. “Ignore them, Honey” she told me. She always said, “They don't know what they're saying. If they are teasing you, it's because they don't like themselves. Just ignore them.”

“It's so hard, Mom,” I said in my head.

I didn’t need Sean to use me to learn that he didn't like himself. Ironically, I desperately wanted him to like me, though. If he didn’t know what he was saying, why did I believe him when he made me feel sub-human? Why did I cover my hook in his presence? I hated me as much as he did, I think. I was the mutant offspring of Lindsay Wagner, the Bionic Woman, and the feared and loathed Captain Hook.

I shoved my hook further into the pocket of my painter pants, a genius multi-pocketed fashion movement perfect for the girl who wanted to hide her hands. I was looking down at my pocket, when I saw him lunge at me from the corner of my eye.

He reached for my arm, pulled it out of my pocket, and swiped his hand across my hook. He took that hand and smeared it across the shoulder of one of the boys behind him.

“Carrie’s germs, no returns!” he called as he ran in the opposite direction. The stunned victim, the one who had been plagued with my germs, looked at me with disgust and wiped his own hand across his shoulder, effectively removing my germs from his shirt.

The crowd of boys scattered and the infected boy chased after them, palm outstretched, far away from his body, looking for someone else to pollute.

My feet were glued to the playground. All around me, kids were running and screaming, laughing and playing. The band of boys made their way across the field.

“Whew, that was a close call,” said my ears. “For a minute there…well, you don’t want to know. Knees? You OK down there?

My body started to relax a bit, having been set free from the human cage. Still though, I was ashamed. “I hate myself,” said my head. “I hate my body. I hate this hook. I hate being different.”

“We know,” my body replied in unison.

“I’m aching,” said my heart.

“I know what to do,” said my head and with that, I took the whole experience and bundled it up in a tight little package in my mind’s eye and bent a big ol’ metal spoon around it with my brain.

Call it magic, call it special powers, call it what you will; I was able to erase that experience. I shoved that bundle of pain and anxiety so far down in me, past my heart, past my voice, past all the things that made me feel it, and put it in a place that felt nothing.

Over time, that place grew larger and wider and occupied a very deep space in me. I became so accustomed to not feeling pain, that for many years in my life, I felt nothing at all. I just stop feeling all of it; pain, joy, love, fun because it became easier.

And it was later in my life that I realized that yes, in fact, I did swim in circles. I was stuck in a cyclical pattern of feeling pain, getting angry, worrying about what others thought of me, hating myself for not speaking up, and then very neatly packaging all that up and stuffing it away until the next time.

At times, I felt like I'd never break out of that vortex. But, I had to remember that I was a bionic bad ass. And, I was really good at ESP - at least in my own mind and body. My heart heard every word I said; the truth and the lies.

The truth was, I was mad at myself for hating myself. I was sad that I was incapable of letting my true voice speak up. I had to start liking the body that I came in and start talking to myself differently. “You are strong! You are powerful! You are destined for great things,” I told myself, even though I didn't always believe it. In fact, sometimes I was lying to myself just to get by - living by the motto, “You gotta fake it, to make it.”

Are these my lives or my truths? It doesn't matter, really. Let them be my life preserver that pulled me out of the failure funnel that tried to suck me down when I was a child.

I can hear the audience in my head now, from that old show I used to watch. They've seen the segment on the girl whose telepathic talks to herself changed the entire course of her life; taking her from a place of fear and self-doubt, of approval seeking and pain, to a place of pure internal strength and power. On cue, they shout, “THAT’S INCREDIBLE!”

And I believe it. With my whole body and being. Yes. I believe it.