Vulnerability

Sometimes, it is so hard to remember, how it felt to be a child. Actually, most of the times I inquire into my experiences before the age of twelve, I can not reconstruct more than five or six “solid” memories at once. One for instance, in which I am carrying my little stuffed cat Toulouse in a frog backpack around on a mountain hike, while my grandma is telling me a story of my granduncle, who cut himself playing unmindfully with his swiss army knife. I never forgot that story, especially not when, a few years later, after another of my “early youth anger attacks”, I found myself with a swiss army knife sticking out of my right wrist, blood pouring all around me. I thought of Toulouse, my little stuffed cat. Or maybe not.

What is the essence of being a child? Innocence? Emotionality? Honesty or the lack of shame? And why can't I connect with these virtues on that very basic level anymore? Is it my loss of simplicity through the active and passive, ongoing construction of complexity around my person and life, which messes up my brain in such fundamental ways that I have to call myself senile when I comes to remembering my general mood in the summer of 1994?

When I tell people about this phenomenon, they either have exactly the same problem or not at all. My grandmother knows “everything” about her childhood and early youth. At times, when I haven't had the insight to communicate this loss of mine, I stuck to make a win of it. I told everyone that I erased my memory on purpose to become more vacant and free within. What a nonsense!

Maybe it is this, vulnerability – or better – the ability to be vulnerable, which differentiates a child's ego from the grown up's one. The ability to allow oneself to be as real as one is. E.g. me: I do not remember and that is, how it is.

As I child, one never had the chance to construct such a cautious and ashamed personality as many people carry around in their adulthood, because a child doesn't even know, if the immediate impact of its random or controlled action is good or bad, until the results start showing up – in favor or misfortune of the child's own sensory apparatus and its interpretation, which often times is overwritten with: novelty.

Vulnerability,

when I talk about my feet

when I can't be sure that I am lovable as I am

when I want to watch somebody, but looking is regarded as staring and I feel strange

when I can't be sure that I will always be able to support all my loved ones

when I think about my dreams of the ultimate truth and feeling like a douche even naming this blog "Vulnerability".

But then... I don't and I have love for myself. I do not have to be right or wrong.

All the love,

THE EONTOURAGE