Tiny Shells
It's after lunch and I've earned myself a small bite of ice cream. That first cold spoonful hits and something in me softens, the way it always has since I was small. There's a particular kind of joy in it, uncomplicated, the kind almost any child knows. The kind that doesn't need a reason.
I'm sitting with a memory now, general and gentle, nothing specific attached to it. Just the feeling of being little and letting a sweet thing be the whole of my attention for a moment. This is where the work begins for me, and maybe for you too. Not in the hard places first, but in the soft doorway that lets you back in.
Today the doorway opens onto a beach.
I'm here with a friend, and we've started looking for shells, the tiny ones, easy to miss if you're moving too fast. We line them up along her arm, one after another, small treasures against skin. It's playful. It's light. And it's also the place where inner child work quietly begins for me, where I start, just a little, to sit with my three-year-old self.
I don't go in all at once. A little bit at a time is enough. That's how it stays mine to hold rather than something that holds me. Something happened to him at three. I won't lay it all out here, only that it was real, and it was early, and it shaped more than I understood for a long time. What I can tell you is what it's like now, to sit beside him gently, without rushing him to explain, the way you'd sit beside any child who isn't ready to talk yet.
Lining up these shells, I notice something. My hands know this motion. I did this before, a long time before this beach, before this friend, before I had any language for what I was doing.
I was ten, alone in my room, lining up my cars.
Over and over I'd set them in rows, move them, reset them. Again and again, more times than I could count, more times than made sense for a boy just playing. I understand now what I couldn't then. I was working something out the only way a ten-year-old knows how, through his hands, through repetition, through a kind of play that was really a quiet processing no one taught me to name. The cars weren't cars. They were how a child carries what he can't yet say.
I don't need to explain it further than that. The truth of it lives in the feeling, not in the details.
Back on the beach, the shells keep coming. My friend laughs at something, the sun is doing what sun does, and the search continues, tiny treasure after tiny treasure. It looks the same as it did a few minutes ago. It isn't. Now I know what this kind of looking has always been for me, a way back to a self who's been waiting a long time to be found gently, not fixed, not diagnosed, just found.
This is the inner child work I've given my life to. Not because I finished it and now hand it down from some healed distance, but because I'm still in it, still learning what my own hands have been trying to tell me for years. I'm not asking anyone to relive what I've relived. I'm offering to sit beside you the way I've learned to sit beside him, patient, unhurried, willing to stay through the parts that don't have words yet.
If some part of you has been circling something for years without knowing how to put it down, I sit with people in exactly that place. Book a session, and we'll start wherever you are.
Comments