“Are you scared?,” I said aloud into the darkness.
“Did that startle you?” The train whistled again deafeningly. The same sound had woken me suddenly moments before. My heartbeat was speeding and my palms were instantly clammy.
“It’s okay to be afraid.”
I was talking to myself.
“It’s okay to be afraid,” I repeated. “I know it sounded scary and loud in the middle of the night, but it’s just a train. Trains come at all times of day. I know you were startled, weren’t you? We’re okay. We’re okay.”
For years the phrase “inner child” made me roll my eyes and squirm. It seemed like new age self-help nonsense and I wasn’t interested. I went to therapy, sure, but that was serious work. The idea of an “inner child” seemed frivolous at best, and painfully awkward at worst.
But that night, alone in my hotel bed in a small city in Mexico, I accidentally met my inner child.
I had been having panic attacks relentlessly for the past few months. I was staving off the death rattle of my five-year relationship; I had recently started to come out of denial about the abuse I’d endured in childhood; Trump had just been inaugurated. In short, my mental health was fishtailing. I would have a few good days and then, apropos of seemingly very little, I would spin out for interminable stretches of time, into the grey, buzzing haze of debilitating anxiety.
My trip to Mexico was an attempt to escape: my relationship, my country, my reality, myself. Which is how I found myself on a beautiful vacation in a tropical paradise sweating, panicking, and talking to myself because a train had whistled too loudly in the middle of the night.
I pushed back the woven rainbow blanket and kept talking all the way to the shower.
“It’s okay to be afraid. We’re okay. It’s okay. We’re okay.”
As soon as the coolness of the water hit my skin, I wept. I cried onto the Talavera tiles until I was spent, then staggered back to sleep, soaked.
I don’t remember the next day or the day after that. I don’t remember much of that vacation, to be honest. When I came home, I kept trying to explain to friends what had happened that night, why such a seemingly simple and kind of weird occurrence was notable.
“I don’t really know who I was talking to, or who was doing the talking, but it felt really good.”
“It was like something in me softened, something that’s been hard for a long time. It’s like my heart was butter.”
“It’s like all the nice things that anyone ever said to me didn’t count until now. I couldn’t hear them before but now I can.”
“I talked to myself the way I always talk to my students and my clients. I guess I needed to practice with them so I could figure out how to do it for me.”
“It’s not like I hated myself before, exactly, but um, I just never really loved myself like that.”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that night I also met my inner loving parent, the one who would treat me with steadiness and compassion, replacing the judgmental, erratic voices I’d heard all my life. The one who would take care of all the things a kid should never have to concern themselves with.
I didn’t immediately commit to tending to my inner child, but I reluctantly kept at it. The awkwardness, which I can now see as the shame of distorted self-protection, did eventually wear off. My inner child’s trust in me deepened, and now they usually let me know loud and clear what’s going on. And I try my best to listen.
My attention span for my own feelings is getting longer. My ability to be celebrate myself is growing. My disdain for my mistakes and weaknesses is diminishing.
I’m learning how to be a better parent to myself all the time. And for the first time ever, I get to learn how to be a kid.
Blanket Fort is an online course for inner child healing. In it, we’ll all meet our own inner child and learn some techniques and practices for being in healthy relationship with these sweet, scared, silly, sad parts of ourselves. Click here for more info.