Elevating the Human Experience. Amelia Dunlop

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Preface

       Ever since I was a little girl, I struggled to feel worthy of love. I didn’t know what to call it as a child, but as I lay in bed at night in the room I shared with my older brother, the evidence seemed to mount in that direction. Something always seemed to be a bit off, crooked, like the pinky finger on my right hand that does not straighten. Children would be equal parts fascinated and repulsed by my crooked finger. I would proudly tell them that it was “genetic,” using a big word to tell them that I was born that way. And, no, as weird as it looked, it did not hurt. Sometimes they wouldn’t believe me, and they would try to force my finger to straighten, pushing it down as hard as they could under a pile of books. That did hurt. And my crooked finger reminded me, and them, that I was not quite worthy.

      It was my mother who noticed that I could not see or hear what other children could. She tells the story of watching me sit dressing my Barbies on the rug while she called my name from across the room. As she tells it, I never looked up, never heard her. I have no memory of this. I had surgery on my ears at age four, and by then I had a 70% hearing loss. My eyes, we discovered later, were closer to blind than they were to 20/20 vision.

      As the world around me grew quieter and more out of focus, I have a clear memory—a memory that I trust in that unreliable and murky place of what we piece together of our past from photograph and story—of running through Heathrow Airport holding my mother's hand to catch a plane to leave our life in London and my father behind. I was five years old. There are no photographs of that day. Although grown-up details have certainly colored in the outlines of memory, I remember feeling the urgency. I felt the suddenness of being woken up in the middle of the night, which was probably just in the predawn hours before I normally woke. I felt the leaving-quietly-ness. I felt the need to hush or to be told again to hush. I felt the need to stop asking why and just put my shoes on, which had laces too difficult for me to tie. I remember wondering why we were running when they had these magical sidewalks that could move for you down the long corridors of the airport. I felt the tug of my mother's hand to please-move-faster-or-we-might-miss-our-plane. Once seated in our row, my mother turned it into a sort of holiday for my brother and me. We were going to visit her mother in Fort Lauderdale, our nana. It would be sunny and warm there. “Wouldn't that be nice?” And the rest of the movie memory fades. That's it. That's all I have of how I went from being a little English girl, living with her mother, father, and brother in their brownstone house near the Clapham tube station, attending an all-girls school, to being a little not-quite-American girl, living with her grandmother in the spare bedroom of her bungalow in Fort Lauderdale, attending a school where I was known for my funny British accent and crooked little finger.

      Upon arrival in Florida, my mother cut off my hair as if to complete the transformation from someone I knew to someone I did not. I had had long brown hair just past my shoulders that used to be pinned back with barrettes and pink ribbons to match my dresses. My mother told me it would be too hot for such long hair (even though she did not cut hers, I noticed). She got my brother and me matching bowl cuts at the local Supercuts. There are photos of us looking like twins in matching yellow and blue striped rugby shirts. I'm the slightly shorter twin missing her two front teeth. I'm smiling. My memory is not of smiling about that shorn version of myself. Since I turned eighteen, I have worn my hair to the middle of my back.

      No doubt my mother and father would have explained to me in whatever words they could summon, words that left no memory, that they were getting a divorce. It wasn't unusual, or traumatic to anybody else except my brother and me. We felt, both he and I, marked as different. We noticed that in our new life that we were the only kids on the block living with their grandmother and not with two parents. I felt that I was not worthy of the perfect mother plus father, plus two kids love square, which we saw on every American television channel and heard in every story book in the early '80s.

      The rest of my early childhood looked normal. I started taking dance classes on Saturday mornings. I made my first friend and First Holy Communion in second grade. We rode our bicycles to Dairy Queen to get soft serve ice cream. The Domino's pizza delivery man came to the door some Friday nights. We jumped waves at the beach. But still I knew something was not quite right. I was a bowl-headed, British-accented girl who burned easily in the sun. I wore a neon green nose plug so that I didn't get water up my nose, infecting the scar tissue in my ears. I still burn with shame at my ridiculous-looking, near-blind, near-deaf unworthy little girl self.

      My brother reminded me that we each tried to run away more than once, to run away from that uncomfortable, unworthy feeling. I remember the need-to-get-away feeling when there seemed to me no cure for the way I felt. I can still see my mother calling for me to come into dinner while I hid high up in the tree in the front garden of my grandmother's house where she would not see me in the growing dusk. I remember her voice changing to higher pitches of urgency as she called and called and called my name. The urgency in her tone shifted to anger. I let her feel fear and anger. I felt fear and anger too. Like my mother, I didn't have words to express my complicated feelings, so I hid instead.

      From my early childhood experiences, I learned at a deep subconscious level that I was not worthy. My feelings of unworthiness needed to be hidden at all costs. Nobody asked that little girl how she felt about leaving her country, her father, her school, her neighborhood, her house, her bedroom, and her hair behind. With my crooked finger, near-sighted eyes, and near-deaf ears, physically I was certainly less than whole. My memories came with near endless tears. I told myself that I had the “gift of tears” because I cried most days of most weeks of most years. I just thought that was what you did—that was the experience of being human.

      I wondered and hoped that maybe I would someday feel worthy of love, if I just worked hard enough or fell in love like they did in storybooks. I wondered if there was a different, better experience of what it meant to be human beyond my reach, but that other people around me seemed to experience. I realize now I suffered as a child. I say that not in any way to blame my mother and father, who raised me as best they could, and equally not to say that my suffering was any flavor of special. While my experiences may have been unique, my suffering was the incredibly ordinary universal kind. But to little-girl me, the feeling of suffering filled my universe. It was my struggle. What I didn't realize then is that it was my suffering that made me most normal, most human. Suffering did not make me unworthy of love. It made my story the same as the story of everyone else who struggles at times to feel worthy of love, which I could never possibly know.

      This book is for people who know what it is like to struggle to feel loved and worthy, when they show up at work. You may struggle to bring your femaleness or maleness, your motherness or fatherness, your Blackness or Brownness, your gayness or Lesbian-ness, your real identity authentically to work. It is also for the people who have no idea what it may feel like to struggle every day to feel loved and worthy, but love people and lead people who do.

      For me, the journey to find the love and worth that makes the experience of being human somehow better, somehow elevated, is a personal one. Although there are times I still very much want to hide my real self up in that tree in my grandmother's garden again, I am learning to come down out of the tree, to show up as my real, vulnerable, authentic self, even at work. Especially at work.