When you are young, there is always that weird little thing you do that you don’t realize you are going to laugh about when you are older. I, being the obnoxiously strange child I was, had several of those “weird little things”. Now you see one of these many things included catching bees in jars and watching them because I had nothing better to do and if you know anything at all about bees, it is that they like to sting giant fleshy creatures that trap them in jars. I don’t think I knew this because after successfully capturing the little insects about fourteen times without getting injured, I began to believe I was somewhat invincible. Children are already fairly reckless but when you throw in thoughts of invincibility they really go the whole mile. I know I did.

About a year after the bee expeditions came to a halt I decided it would be a good idea to climb to the highest branch of the tree in my front yard and play with my Barbies there. I didn’t get much out of it but at least I got to ride in an ambulance like I always wanted to. And it’s safe to say that it is not what I expected and that when I finally arrived at the hospital all that pain I was feeling suddenly dissipated so I was bouncing on the gurney.  Somehow though, after this debacle, I still found pain to be foreign concept because I magically ended up feeling fine in the end.

Looking back on it, I know I had to have been just the slightest bit insane to keep trying again and again at these fruitless and ridiculous tasks. I think I held the saying, “so you try try again” a little too near and dear to my heart. Now I may not have tried to play with barbies while precariously sitting on a branch again but I did climb to the top of a twenty five foot tall tube slide without falling. This was before I developed a fear of heights. And, you know, I may not have tried to catch any more bees in jars but I sure as hell walked everywhere barefoot for about a month and a half. This was how I discovered that people liked to break glass objects in parking lots and further, how I discovered that the sun does indeed heat up the ground.

I was too curious for my own good and grew rather fond of the famous Monty Python quote: “It’s just a flesh wound.” I used to count how many scars I had racked up every year because due to my careless behavior, I had more burns, cuts and bruises than it made sense to have. I had so many in fact, that I didn’t know where the majority of them came from, especially the ones that showed up on my face. Of course those ones never left scars so there was no reason for it to bother me.

So among the weird things I did that were reckless and carelessly destructive to my own body, it is important to think about all the things I did to others as well. So I was a rather strong kid and I did, regrettably, go around showing all the young boy scouts that I had a six pack. For some reason I was incredibly obsessed with the fact that people gave me awe and attention for being as muscular as I was and also being a girl.

Then there was the whole boy or girl debate. Understand that I grew up around boys. My brother was a boy, my family friends were all boys, the boy scouts were all boys(I would hope) and all the girls I did give the light of day too were like me, they grew up around boys. Still once I made it to age six, I was constantly switching between the decision about whether girls or boys were better friends because almost instantaneously coinciding with entering elementary school, I learned that boys had cooties. Which were bad apparently? But according to all the boys I had them too.

So what was the issue? The real issue I had was adjusting to the way that girls acted differently than boys since I was apparently going to catch the cooties I already had if I so much as hugged a boy. Which brings uo another point. All the boys I grew up with only hugged each other to show off hard they could squeeze the air out of each others lungs. Then all the girls and adults told me pink was a girly color so I put on a smile and said it was my favorite. To this day I hate pink, and I still don’t understand the concept of being gentle.

Now I am painfully making my way through my teen years and looking back on the way I was asking whatever the heck happened to me. The answer is nothing happened. I didn’t change, I evolved. I am just as capable of everything I did then as I am now and, some of the things, haven’t changed a bit. I’m still that deluded little girl who didn’t take precautions because I didn’t think I needed to. 

I am the invincible child.