Читать книгу Misfit to Maven - Ebonie Allard - Страница 8

NOT NORMAL AND THE QUEST FOR NORMALITY

‘NOW I AM SIX I AM CLEVER AS CLEVER, I THINK I’LL STAY SIX FOR EVER AND EVER.’

– AA MILNE

The year I turned seven things changed for me.

One day, while I was still six, we were driving to a place we’d not been before. We were going to visit an old friend of my mum’s. I was super excited because she had told me that he had fairies at the bottom of his garden, that she’d seen them and maybe I would see them too. On the way there in the car my parents fought; she was a fucking-awful-map-reading-passenger, he was a shouty-aggressive-impatient-driver, and I was an annoying are-we-nearly-there-yet child, who got shouted at by them in unison for trying to make them stop. My grandma and my brother were also in the car. At one point I remember my dad saying, ‘Well if you don’t fucking know, let’s just follow that car, he seems to know where he’s going.’

Pretty normal family car journey, right?

When we finally arrived I snuck off to the end of the garden and sure enough, right down at the bottom, past the lawn, in the long grass, hanging out by an overgrown Christmas tree, there were fairies. They were awesome.

No one else could see them, but I didn’t mind – the adults believed I could and so that made it OK. I was special, I could see fairies and it was magical. That was when I was still six.

When I was seven it was no longer OK to be psychic or intuitive or magical. Up until then I thought it was, because people believed me, but then one day no one believed me anymore.

Not long after my seventh birthday I was walking home with my mum, excited because my grandma was making me a skirt. She’d not told me anything about it, just that it was almost done. We didn’t get new things all that often and I could not wait. My grandma’s house was about a ten-minute walk from ours. I asked if we could go via her house and get it. I was told no.

‘She might not be in.’ My mum tried to hurry me along and get us home.

All I could think about was the skirt. I’d imagined it in my head over and over. And then I saw it lying on the street.

‘That’s my skirt!’ I trilled, skipping over and picking it up.

‘No it’s not. Leave it alone. Put it back.’

‘But I KNOW it’s my skirt. I promise it’s my skirt. It must have fallen out of Granny’s handbag. Please can we take it home!’

How did I know it was my skirt? I just knew. I love how the French have two words for ‘knowing’: savoir and connaître. There are proper definitions of when to use which, but in my mind one is for the stuff you just know, and the other is for the things you learn to know. I just knew all sorts of things as a child. Before I was seven I think I was 100% in tune with who I was; my wild uninhibited intuitive nature was as yet untarnished and in that moment, standing on the street with my mother, it changed. I could no longer trust what I knew because my mum, who knew everything as far as I was concerned, was MORE sure than I was that this was not my skirt.

When we got to our house Grandma was there, having a cup of tea with my dad and brother.

‘Hello darling,’ she said, ‘go and fetch me my handbag, I’ve got your skirt for you.’

I felt like saying ‘No you don’t it’s down the street, on the wall where I left it, waiting for some other little girl to call it hers.’

But she was excited and so I was too. I fetched her handbag, gave it to her and watched as she pulled everything out. She pulled out tissues, then Polo mints, then keys and the coin purse she used to give us elevenses money, but no skirt.

‘Was it pink and blue with little flowers on it and a stretchy elasticated waist?’ I piped.

‘Yes!’ she exclaimed.1 ‘How do you know that? Did you sneak a look?’ She wagged her finger at me.

‘NO,’ I shouted. ‘I know because it fell out of your handbag and it’s down the road!’ I was off, I had already swung open the front door and I flew as fast as my legs would allow back to where I’d seen MY skirt.

That day was the first time I had an inkling of ‘not normal’. It began to register that KNOWING, the kind that comes from deep inside, isn’t normal. I didn’t like how it felt to be different. I wanted to be loved and trusted unconditionally. I began to be curious about ‘normal’.

And it wasn’t long before I encountered an opportunity to make a trade for normality.

I need to set the scene a little more... My parents did the very best they could for us; I guess I’d describe them as innovative ‘now’ age hippies, way ahead of their time. They fed us organic and whole foods; we didn’t have sugar until we were at least three. Unnecessary vaccinations and medicines were a no-no and in education we were gifted to Steiner Schools2 as much as they could afford. Steiner school was great for me at Kindergarten; there were stories and large colourful wax crayons and yoga. It was only later, after I was seven, that it was another thing that I decided made me weird and not normal.

Steiner School meant no television and no plastic toys. Our toys were animals carved out of wood or handmade dolls. It was beautiful, but it was not ‘normal’. One day, I took my handmade doll to the park. The sort of park you got next to every housing estate in England in the eighties: a strip of grass with a swing-set, a slide with puddles on it, a sandbox full of cigarette ends and a couple of ride-on animals on big metal springs. We were at the park with our au pair, a young French girl who sat on a bench and read her book. While she read, we played. For my brother that meant interacting with the equipment and for me it meant interacting with other kids. I chatted to a girl from the estate. She spoke differently to us. She said ‘waughtar’, we said ‘water’. She was normal. She had a television at home and she had Star Wars figures with her in the park and I had a handmade doll. We switched. My mum was furious.

This experience reinforced what I believed to be true. We really weren’t normal.

The next BIG thing that happened when I was seven is that two girls I didn’t know died from anorexia. My dad was reading the newspaper and when he got to the story about these young girls he called me over and we had a conversation about it. Before that day I hadn’t really thought anything about my body. It just was. I can see now that the relationship I developed over the years with food has been for the most part about control and certainty. When I needed to find and gain control, ‘anorexia’ and later bulimic behaviour was what I pulled out of my toolbox. Later I moved on to other things too, but restricting and then rebelling and binging on food has most often been my addictive and numbing technique of choice. I am not an expert on, nor have I studied eating disorders or addiction; I have learned a great deal about food and nutrition over the years but what I recount throughout this book is only my experience and what I believe about my on-going relationship with ‘Self and God’. (One of the best books I have ever read on this subject is Women, Food and God – An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything by Geneen Roth. I highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves restricting or bingeing on food.)

Three months after I turned seven we moved to the south coast, to Brighton. Brighton is my spiritual home. I have lived here on and off ever since. Even when I live somewhere else, Brighton is still my ‘home’.

We arrived the weekend of the hurricane in 1987 and whilst my brother slept soundly through it, I got into bed with my mum and dad and began to realise that the world could be a pretty scary place. While my mum lit tea lights and placed them all around, I crept over to the sash windows and carefully looked outside. Dustbin lids flew up the street, trees had fallen onto cars. It was fierce. It was not normal.

Wild weather like that probably makes everyone think about God. Or the Universe, or the Divine, or whatever. As I lay in bed I really began, probably for the first time, to think in this way. Something MUCH bigger, greater than me, could crumple cars and blow over trees.

As a child I knew a little about Judaism and that our families had been Jewish but the teachings were not passed on to us. Neither of my parents practised any sort of organised faith. Being Jewish is passed through one’s mother and my mum wasn’t Jewish because her mum wasn’t. Both our fathers were, so I saw myself as three quarters Jewish. I felt and still feel that our ancestry is a very important part of my identity. Whilst the faith and teachings weren’t of so much interest to me, the rituals, the story and history was. We didn’t really celebrate the Jewish holidays (apart from the occasional Seder at Pesach with my paternal grandmother.) My mum got us involved with the more pagan holidays – Solstice, Mayday, and Equinox and we sort of celebrated Christmas and Easter like everyone else. I mean we did, but not the religious part. I was fascinated by my friends who went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I had another friend who went to church every Sunday and if I stayed the night at hers I wasn’t allowed to come up and take communion with them so instead I remained alone in the pews eating her penny sweets, contemplating why anyone would want to eat the body of Christ. Our Jewishness or non-Jewishness confused me. It added to an array of things that confused me. I had so many questions. I was so curious. I needed answers and Google hadn’t been invented yet. So I went to my dad. Sometimes when I asked a question he would answer and other times, he would throw the question back to me and I would say: ‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know is a lazy answer.’ He sent me off to look in an encyclopaedia.

Encyclopaedias are enormous and these days you can’t give them away, but back then owning a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas was a big deal. They were huge and they had no pictures; they were boring. So often, after what felt like forever of trying to find the right book and the right section, I would just make something up.

In my adult life this is something that I am thankful I learned, I am now proud of my ability to find out or blag it. I believe that saying YES and finding out how to execute something afterwards is one of the most commonly shared attributes of entrepreneurs.

My childhood – the liberalism, the organic and wholefood diet, yoga, open mindedness, lack of TV and encouragement of creativity in both thinking and expression – were fantastic. NOW I am hugely grateful and thankful for the attention, consideration and energy my parents gave us, but in the 1990s? Not so much. I wanted NORMAL. I wanted a normal name. I wanted a TV. I wanted plastic toys. I wanted a hairdresser or someone qualified to cut my hair. Being the hippy child with hand-me-down clothes and hedge-like frizzy hair who made up answers about things she didn’t know was not cool and it was not normal.

Being normal meant belonging, and I didn’t feel as though I belonged. I didn’t belong anywhere. We were a sort of nothing, in between everything and everybody else. We weren’t council-estate poor. We weren’t rich enough to eat whatever we wanted out of the fridge. We weren’t real Jews but we weren’t atheists. We didn’t believe strongly in politics. There wasn’t a family motto, or a football team. We didn’t have a band that we were publicly in support of. In fact we didn’t do anything publicly. We kept ourselves to ourselves, but we weren’t a team either. I constantly felt like I had something to be ashamed of, but I wasn’t sure what. I felt like we had to hide, but I wasn’t sure why.

Take Halloween. In most people’s houses it was a fun time, for dressing up all spooky, having fun, and eating sweets. In our house it was an evening when we stayed in, at the back of the house, with all the lights turned off. There was no jack-o-lantern outside our house, no answering of the door if it was knocked on. I didn’t understand what we were ashamed of, or why we couldn’t interact. I felt like a misfit.

As soon as I was old enough to sleep over at other people’s houses I did. As soon as I could eat TV dinners, or watch Neighbours and study normal at someone else’s house, I did. I was really good at fitting in. I discovered that I could be a wonderful chameleon. Other people’s parents loved me. I was polite, I offered to help out. I created rapport. I mirrored and matched them way before I had any idea about NLP3 or what it was I was doing. I just wanted to be part of something, and feel like I belonged.

My beautiful little sister was born in February 1990. She was not the kitten I had asked for, and I didn’t know what we needed another family member for, but my parents seemed excited.4 The upside of my sister’s arrival for me as an independent nine-and-a-half-year-old was that I could get away with being out more often.

I spent most of my time with the kids up the street. They were SO normal. The kind of normal I wanted to be. They were my first surrogate family. We watched TV. We started ‘the babysitters club’ like in a book we had read. We recorded our very own radio show on the boombox my grandmother gave me. (My brother joined in too sometimes.) We made up dance routines and sang tunelessly to Madonna and New Kids on the Block. I had my first crush (Joey McIntyre – he was only 16 and I figured that wasn’t much of an age gap). I knew every single word to every single song on Hanging Tough, Step by Step and The Immaculate Collection.

Sometime in 1991 it was time to wean my sister off breast milk and so my mum and I went on a holiday. It was a whole weekend in France, and it was just the two of us: I was so excited! Spending time just my mum and me was so rare. This and one other weekend that we went to Monkton Wyld Court5 are the two memories I have from my childhood and teens where it was just the two of us and we weren’t seething or screaming at one another. That weekend was lovely. It was also the next time that I had a profound (and life-saving) intuitive and unexplainably magic moment. The place we visited was a commune of creative people who were seeking to bring a version of Tipi Valley6 to France.

I remember a tiny fluffy black kitten who followed me everywhere, I felt honoured. Organically grown tomatoes that I picked myself, which tasted amazing. Fresh duck eggs, with the largest and most golden yolks I had ever seen, and Wolfy. Wolfy was a four-year-old girl who was also there with her mum. She was awesome, we went exploring the epic grounds together. We were the only kids, except for a local boy called Jay. Jay was about my age and he spoke a little English but he was a boy, so we hung out for a while and then we went off on our own. In the grounds there was a forest and we walked in it, we walked and walked and walked. We found a stream and moss and made totems out of rocks. It was magical. At some point I realised that I was the ‘adult’ and that it was probably time to go home. We began walking back the way we’d come. After a while I realised we were lost. Really lost. The kind of lost where you try to find, but can’t see, the sun to make a guess at your bearings. I was eleven and I had a four year old with me and it would start getting dark soon. Fuck. I don’t know why I did what I did next, but remembering the fairies in the garden that the adults couldn’t see, I instructed Wolfy to sit down cross-legged opposite me. I explained that we were lost, and that we needed help.

‘Do you remember Jay?’

‘Yep.’ She nodded her little dreadlocked head back at me.

‘OK, good. I need you to think about him. Think really hard. We’re going to send him a message. We’re going to tell him with our minds that we need him, and we’re going to tell him where we are.’

She didn’t even flinch at this bizarre request. She closed her eyes and did it.

I did too. I concentrated with all my might on telling Jay how important it was that he listened and that we needed him.

‘How long do we wait?’ a little voice broke my thoughts.

‘As long as it takes. He won’t be long. He’s just got to find us.’

It was about twenty minutes I think. He appeared with a smile on his face.

‘Bonjour. Ça va?’

I actually have no idea what he said, but he took us home. When I asked him how he knew we needed him and where to come, he told me he just knew. Something came to him and told him we needed his help. I mentally noted that some other kids could connect to the knowing too, and then promptly forgot as soon as we were back in England and our old lives again.

I had a good childhood – I was loved and cared for – but I also always had an angst inside me waiting to get out and explore. Some of you will really be able to relate. I wanted to go and discover the whole world, right now! I felt too big for our little life. I felt destined for grandeur and at the same time I felt a duty of care to my family. I was torn between running away to be the curious wild child, and staying put to look after my tribe. My family.

When I was seven I tried to run away to the fair.

I didn’t get very far.

I was out with my Grandma and my brother. We were walking along the promenade of Brighton sea front. I wanted to go on the rides, hear the voices of other children and spend some time soaking in ‘normal’... I wanted to have FUN!

‘No. It’s time to go home.’

‘I’ve got pocket money.’ I pleaded

‘No. I’ll leave you here, come on.’

‘Go home without me then!’ I stomped my foot and stood my ground.

A battle of wills ensued.

My Grandma took my brother by the hand and walked away, along the boardwalk to the stairs that went down towards the way home.

I waited.

I wanted to call her bluff. I knew this game. They weren’t really going to leave me here. I waited as long as I could bear (I was seven, it couldn’t have been more than five minutes). I ran towards the next set of stairs, thinking they would only have gotten that far. I gathered pace and whizzed down to the bottom, scanning around for them as best I could while still moving and not tripping.

They had gone.

In that split second I felt two things:

1. Contraction/Fear: They left me - I am alone in the big dangerous world!!!!!!

2. Expansion/Autonomy: I’m FREEEEEEE and I can go to the fair!!

I looked around for them again, and I couldn’t see them. I felt sure that the world was conspiring to allow me to go to the pier and go on the rides. WOOHOO! My little entrepreneurial brain kicked in, creatively solving the problem. I walked along the roadside where the cars were parked and found the parking payment machine.

Maybe someone dropped some change and then I can go on the rides!

The first one had nothing. I carried on carefully walking along the roadside by the parked cars. I reached the next pay station. I reached up into the change slot and wiggled my little fingers around. Still nothing.

Nee Naw, Nee Naw...

Startled by the siren pulling up right next to me I jumped.

My memory of what happened next is awash with shame as my joy turned to guilt watching my grandma crying and my brother distraught.

The policeman shouted. His attempt to frighten me into not running away again, or to see the severity of the situation, was lost on me, I just felt BAD.

I felt misunderstood. I didn’t mean to upset anyone. I wasn’t hurting anyone. I just wanted to have some fun!

‘You are so irresponsible. Look how upset you’ve made your grandmother.’

I felt horrible.

The things our brain picks out to remember and give meaning to are weird and random. Last year I was at T. Harv Eker’s MMI7 in London and Marcus DeMaria led us through a visualisation process to uncover an early emotional incident involving money that had impacted our money blueprint, and this story is the little gem that appeared in my mind. As I relived the memory consciously for the first time in years I realised that my brain had hung on to an emotional memory and given it meaning: ‘Look how upset you’ve made your grandma and brother – you are irresponsible and money is not for having fun. You don’t deserve to have fun with money!’ or something like that.8

When I was nine I tried to run away again. My brother and I packed some rice cakes and tools into the largest of my dad’s handkerchiefs we could find, and after tying it to a stick, Dick Whittington-style, we attempted to run away on a skateboard. We walked to the top of the hill by our house and with him at the front and me at the back, one arm holding him and the other our supplies, we attempted to abscond on his large white deck with its eighties neon wheels. We didn’t get very far. We veered off the pavement into a parked car and I hurt my arm so we went home.

Outside of my family life there was school. At this point I was at Brighton Steiner School. The class I was in was made up of ten boys and ten girls. We were all pretty weird and I liked that. It normalised things. It was like having a whole class of siblings. I got picked on but I didn’t mind it all that much; it felt like the kind of thing brothers and sisters say to each other so I let it go. I saw the name calling as affectionate. I figured that it was harmless fun. I liked school for a while. I really enjoyed learning in such a narrative way.

When my teacher picked on me it felt different, it didn’t feel like a nickname or like kids playing, it felt personal. One day I came into school with a piece of indigo dyed silk tied into my hair and bright turquoise dangly dolphin earrings on. I had just had dyed the silk with my mum and was so proud of what we had done. The earrings were new, my newly pierced ears had just healed, and I felt like a ‘lady.’ I almost skipped into class. I felt beautiful. I was happy to share who I was with the world. As I entered the room my teacher stopped me.

‘Ebonie Allard, this is not a fashion parade, take that ridiculous garb off now.’

I could hear everyone laughing.

I was so embarrassed.

I felt ashamed. After that I retreated, believing somewhere that it was shameful to be expressive and free and beautiful.

A new girl joined our class. She had a birthday party. She was allowed to invite 10 boys and 10 girls to her party. She invited everyone but me.

On Monday at school everyone else was laughing and joking together.

I remember feeling like I didn’t belong there anymore. I wasn’t part of anything.

I had felt OK at school but now I didn’t fit in anywhere. I started to spend a lot of time alone. I liked being alone, but I also hated it. I wanted to fit in and I wanted to belong. I felt more and more like a misfit and less and less like I belonged anywhere. And that was before my parents separated, and the hormones of adolescence kicked in.

1. You might think that no one ‘exclaims’ but my grandma did, she often exclaimed with all her might and vigorous gesticulation.

2. Steiner (Waldorf) education is a humanistic approach based on the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Steiner distinguished three broad stages in child development. His early years education focuses on providing practical, hands-on activities and environments that encourage creative play. The emphasis in junior school is on developing pupils’ artistic expression and social capacities, fostering both creative and analytical modes of understanding. The secondary education focuses on developing both critical and empathetic understandings of the world through the study of mathematics, arts, sciences, humanities and world languages. Throughout, the approach stresses the role of the imagination in learning and places a strong value on integrating intellectual, practical, and artistic activities across the curriculum rather than learning each academic discipline as a separate concern. The educational philosophy’s overarching goal is to develop free, morally responsible, and integrated individuals equipped with a high degree of social competence. Teaching is intended to emphasize qualitative over quantitative assessment methods. Each school has a high degree of autonomy to decide how best to construct its curriculum and govern itself.

3. Neuro Linguistic Programming.

4. I love my sister to pieces and I am SO happy she was born. But in 1990 I was nine and a half and I was fucked off. I wanted a kitten. My brother had a rabbit, and it all felt very unfair.

5. http://www.monktonwyldcourt.co.uk/About_the_Court/index.html I think we went so that she could research EO (Education Otherwise). There was a brief period where they thought about educating us at home.

6. Tipi Valley is the daddy of all UK Eco communities. Founded in 1976, it’s a 200-acre expanse of rolling countryside bought piece by piece from local farmers by its 200 or so residents (100 during the winter). The community includes families, singletons, activists, hippies, many ‘originals’, festival junkies, environmentalists, astrologers, artists, musicians and the like. The majority live in low-impact dwellings – tipis, yurts, caravans, huts, round houses – scattered across the idyllic valley. Source: http://www.huckmagazine.com/. For more information about communal living and eco-communities see http://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/.

7. http://www.millionaireminduk.com/ A 3-day seminar created by T. Harv Eker on money and mindset.

8. To identify your money memories and reframe them go to www.misfit2maven.com/bonuses