Experiments in Living

The Early Years

Since I write a lot about experiences and lessons learned in life, I thought I would share some of the context of who I am, and where I’m coming from, in an attempt to answer the questions of who I am and how I got started writing this blog on personal development. Here is the first part of my “life story” and how I first became aware of myself as person trying to find her place in the world

I was born Hull, UK on the 16th August 1978, daughter #2 to my parents, both primary school teachers. I had a similar upbringing to millions of other British children growing up in the 1980s, we never seemed to have much cash, but I wouldn’t say we were poor either. The great event of my early life was my brother being born when I was five, which will embarrass him greatly, but was the most amazing thing ever. We got this whole new person to add to our family, and I was especially happy to have a brother, as I already had a sister. My childhood is made up of two halves: until the age of ten I lived in a seaside town on the east coast of England. As a young girl I had a recurring dream about the sea coming in and not stopping, and even now if I am stressed I will dream about flooding.

A serious kid

As a young child, I was very serious and a deep thinker. I used to freak out a lot of adults because I had a way of cutting through all the bluster to the heart of the matter. It would frustrate me that because of my age I was not taken seriously, and grate on me when adults would ask “how do you know that?” or act all surprised because I could use words of more than one syllable to express myself (which I did frequently). As I got older, I learned that the best way to blend in was to stay quiet and not rock the boat.

When I was ten, my family moved house, only to the next county, but it might as well have been a world away. I did not cope very well with the change and spent a pretty miserable final year at primary school, where I found it difficult to make friends. I had been a fairly sociable kid up until then, but I became withdrawn that year. The move to secondary school a year later was also fairly grim, and I was fairly depressed for most of my early teens. I wasn’t particularly bullied at school, but I was a fairly unpopular kid. My ego took a real battering during those years, so I would escape into the world of poetry and rock music. Anything that made me feel that there had been someone else who had felt as weird and useless as I did. I guess I needed the affirmation that someone else had been here, that I was not the first person to feel the way I did. I became just a little obsessive over certain bands. I used to listen to Automatic for the People by REM on a repeat loop, just to give you some idea. It was around this time that I first became interested in vegetarianism, but my parents would not let me go veggie, as they were concerned that it would somehow damage my health. I still think that they were genuinely concerned that somehow it would be bad for me, rather than any other agenda. I used to spend a lot of time feeling like an outsider when I was at school. I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, and I left school with good qualifications, but I spent a lot of that time feeling stupid and ugly.

Coming out of my shell

Things started to get better when I was 16. My exam results had given me the confidence to stay on at school to do A-levels, and it was during this time that I finally started to build a social circle. I studied English Literature and knowing that whatever weird, crazy things are going on in your head, someone else has been there and documented them seemed to be an enormous help in coming to terms with life. It was as if I could see that there was a way out, that I didn’t have to be hemmed in by my own thoughts. I wrote a lot of poetry of that time, most of which has long since been disposed of, but it proved to be a valuable outlet for some of the teenage angst that I was feeling, as did listening to grunge music and dressing appropriately! My confidence was growing, but I was still anxious about doing the right thing.

Travel broadened my mind

The summer before going to college, I went to Poland on an exchange scheme as a teaching assistant on an summer camp for Polish youngsters who were learning English. It was my first real experience of teaching, and I loved it. I really enjoyed working with young people even then, although most of them were only a few years younger than myself. Another element of the month away was that I experienced living in a community at close quarters with the other staff - we lived together, ate together, socialised together, it was a very intense experience. I learned a lot about what makes people “tick” and how social groups form and evolve. I was also introduced to MBTI personality types by one of the other teachers, which gave me another insight into the human animal. A people watcher was born!

While in Poland, we visited the concentration camp at Auschwitz which had a profound effect on me. The lasting image I have is of the personal belongings that were taken from the people, the glasses, false teeth, and the mountains of shoes. The shoes were so difficult, so visceral, to think that this is what people were reduced to, a pile of a few personal effects. I could not help but question how far any of us are from conspiring with such atrocities, after all, when you are on the side of the oppressors, doesn’t it favour you to keep the status quo, if for no other reason than through fear that they may turn on you? It is so easy to judge, but who knows what went on inside people’s heads. All you need is to dehumanise the oppressed and then you can treat them however you please.

On returning to Heathrow airport, my flight was delayed, which somehow led to me perusing the bookshop and buying “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman. This was my first insight into psychology and it fascinated me, how someone could be a genius in intelligence terms, but totally lacking when it came to relating to other human beings. Reading this book turned out to be the ideal primer to university life, where I could start again and nobody knew about my adolescent unpopularity. I could work on my own emotional intelligence and my fellow students would never guess at what I had come from. The thought of starting a new life was appealing, and in many ways I took advantage of that. However, there were certain demons which would not just go away, no matter how perfect my life looked on the surface.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of my backstory: The College Years

Tags: inspiration, Personal Growth, Poland