I was born with a condition. It was not fatal to me, but it did impede me a fair bit before I understood it completely. Its scientific name was one that I could never remember or pronounce but its colloquial name is Inspiration. It effected not only me, but to an extent, everyone else around me as well.
I woke up in the mornings with my mum feeling sad and my dad reading the newspaper. “Crying helps heal the wounds of the heart,” I would say as soon as my mouth opened and my mother would look at me all depressed and cry. My father would bark at me to just sit down and eat my cereal. My older brother would then walk down the stairs and my mother would feel a bit better. At least this one is normal she would think.
My parents knew something was wrong with me when the first words out of my mouth when I was a baby was “living is only worth doing once.” They rushed me to a doctor where he diagnosed me with Inspiration. “What does that mean doctor?” My mother asked crying, “what does it mean for my little Holly?”
He looked at her very seriously and said, “she will never be able to communicate normally, all she will want to do is say inspirational things and all she ever will write is some inspirational stuff.” My mother put her hands over her eyes and bawled her eyes out. “Is there nothing we can do?” my father asked looking at my helpless mother. The doctor shook his head and looked at me sitting on his desk, trying to put his statoscope into my mouth. “This condition effects one in every twenty six million people. I’m afraid the only thing you can do is give her as normal of a life as possible, and try not to let her near too many Internet forums.”
Like all children with conditions, I grew up not understanding why everyone behaved around me differently then they would have to other children my own age. I studied everyone around me carefully while growing up. I watched them try to minimize contact with me. Even my teacher’s tiptoed around me and hardly met my eye. My parents did not want to hear anything I said, and only my actually brother talked to me but usually only to bully me.
At first I decided to pretend that I was shy and not talk, then the ache in my jaw started. It first began as a small itch, and then the itch grew until it became a sharp pain, and I had to open my mouth. “Not very often you get a second chance at life, so you should make one yourself,” I shouted out in the middle of class one day. All the kids dropped their coloring pencils and turned to stare at me. I was not deterred though; I was denied speech for so long. “If you don’t achieve what you want in life now, then when are you going to achieve it? Life is a passage of time that will slowly trickle away from your hands. Grab on to your chances! Pull with your might, and let your heart guide you away.”
That day, three of the kids in my class went into convulsions and two started crying. I did not blame them; we were only five. The teacher in that class however quit her job to pursue her dream of scuba diving with whale sharks. Later I would find out half the children in the class went on to have their dream jobs and became very successful in life. I’m not sure about the other half, but I’m sure they are doing well too. I nevertheless on that day was punished for speaking out loud. No one wanted to be my friend after my yelling. The voice in my head told me, “true friends are the ones that you find accidentally like a pretty flower by the road side most overlook.” I told it to shut up.
I was sent to the principles office several times during my childhood, and more so doing my teenage years. “Holly Atlerson. Do you know why you are here again?” the short bald man with a moustache would ask. “Why I am here is not a matter of presence, but a matter of being,” I would say. He would sigh.
“I’m tired of all this nonsense Holly, it’s all in your head.”
“Maybe everything around is all in our heads and to the world we do not matter. But even if it is all in our head it is our only world to us, and maybe that is all we need” I said. He would sigh again and pull out his handkerchief to wipe the top of his shiny head. “Holly, you are a teenager now, not a young girl anymore. You recently lost us three very good teachers. Do you know how hard it is to teach a girl like you?” I had the decently at least to keep quiet to that.
“Now I hear you inspired the football team to train harder and they are now winning every game and you inspired the chess team to be more extroverted and make more friends. The cheerleading team has won seven competitions and has made it to the state finals. We did not even have a cheerleading team! I have no clue where they came from!” He pounded his fist on the table to make his point. I stared at his fist not wanting to meet his eyes.
“Three of our graduates are now successful lawyers and one has donated an Olympic size swimming pool to the school. There was no space so we had to put it on top of that newly refurbished gymnasium that was built for us by that anonymous donator. On top of that none of our children know how to swim and we had to introduce swimming to the school curriculum and now everyone can swim so well. One boy was even scouted to maybe go to the Olympics when he gets older!” He glared at me, as though this was entirely my fault that good things were happening to his little school. It was, except for the cheerleaders. I too had no clue where they came from. “Holly,” the principle said with a sigh. “No one needs your help, let them be themselves,” he said and then shooed me away.
I spent that night crying in my room until I was visited by my older brother. “Hey Holliday what’s up?” Holliday was his nickname for me. It was short for I need a holiday away from you. I looked up at him from my bed. “Sometimes it takes a lifetime for a change to be noticed but at least you made a start.”
“Huh,” he said and sat on my bed. “Who’s asking you to change?” He was always very good at translating from whatever it was I said. He was also very immune to my talks for he had grown up with them.
“The world may not know you as you know yourself but maybe it’s your fault that you haven’t tried to show the world the true you.”
“Holliday, I highly doubt the world is trying to change you.” I looked at him still with tears in my eyes. He chuckled and brushed my hair away from my tears and snot. There were times when he acted like a real brother and those times I will always cherish. Then he would say something horrible, like “you know you look like crap right now.” I punched him and continued to sulk. “The world doesn’t know what it wants,” he said. “Sometimes it does need a push in the back, but you really don’t have to push too hard.” I looked at him as though I had a question mark over my head. “Hol,” he said to me. “Listen to me. Sometimes all we need is a gentle tap in the back, or even a slight push that no one can feel so that we feel that we did it ourselves. That’s all we want really. To feel like we did it. Maybe you can’t see that just yet or maybe it will take a while to implement, but that’s okay alright? For now, you can cry. After all, crying helps heal the wounds of the heart,” he smiled and I punched him in the shoulder. “But,” he continued on, “maybe sometimes what all of us needs is a gentle tap to help each other out. So, this,” he said, and tapped me on the back, “is your gentle tap.”
He was right though, although it took a while for me to stop. The ache in my jaw continued to bore me down until I realized I could release it in littler ways. I pretended to talk to myself in the earshot of others before their big basketball game. I wrote stuff on bathroom stalls, with erasable marker of course, and even stuffed inspirational notes into people’s bags when they were not looking. My favorite time of all was the end of the year when yearbooks were being passed around, and I could write whatever came to my head in small cursive writing that was slightly harder to read but still packed with the motivating jabber that had to come out of me.
I didn’t graduate high school with the best of grades. The only thing I could really do well in was math, which is inspirational by itself it seems, at least in my head. Universal constants are a thing of beauty already. I did find out that one of the people marking my test papers quit his job and went on to be an astronaut though, a lifelong dream he had I suppose. I also found out the reason why the principle was never affected by me was because being a mopey principle of that high school was his dream and he was living it well.
After awhile of writing lines for gift cards which I thought might be my job forever, I landed myself a job helping to write scripts for movies. Subtle pushes are my specialties. The pep talks that coaches give their boys in the locker rooms, the poor loving mother who tells her daughter to be better than what she was, and the one-liners at the very end of the movies that make people cry. One of the boys in my class always wanted to be a movie producer and he brought me with him into the industry when he finished his studies. Together we’ve both become successful and are about to be married this fall. Turns out he always had a crush on me but my older brother did not approve of him. They were in the football team together and my brother made a condition that unless he was successful first he could not have me. “She’s special,” my brother would tell him sometimes after practice, “and you aren’t yet.”
I sometimes think of that song that goes ‘I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do, so I’ll leave it up to you.’ I thought that leaving it up to others is just pushing away your responsibility, which is not fair in the least bit. If you want to make that change then make it yourself! My head would scream. Then, I think maybe the song is changing the world in its own little way. For helping others change helps the world itself to grow, because it is not only you that lives here is it? You don’t need much to change the world. Maybe all you need to do is to give others a gentle tap.
Comments (0)
See all