Love Letters to My Past: The Girl that Talked to Trees

Bitterness doesn’t coat my tongue as much as hindsight does now.

Sometimes I find myself in a daydream entranced by the environment my mind vividly recalls.

Suddenly, I’m two feet shorter and a lot lighter. Not just in weight but mentally, too. This lighter and smaller me is a young girl that throws herself into diaries and pretends to shop by circling clothes in the JCPenny catalog she knows she probably won’t receive.

That little girl had stories that seeped out in all the ways that play time reflects the imagination in a child’s mind.

In my childhood home, a lime green lamp shade illuminates the corner of my bedroom at night, and I’d pretend it was candlelight as I wrote “Dear Diary.”

“Today we pretended the large puddles in the field were lakes and went swimming. I haven’t seen Sam and Julia in a while. Sometimes I wish we lived in a neighborhood because then maybe I’d have a friend.”

And then I’d sign my full name because I thought it was cool to have a middle name.

Elizabeth Diana Bradcovich.

The swing set my dad built was tall with two wide seated swings so that both adults and kids could enjoy. A kid at heart, I think he just wanted to play, too. That swing would take me to places I’d visit via the imagination that canvased my mind after watching a movie or reading a book.

Today, I’m going to wherever the castles are. I think they’re in Ireland. I gave myself a new name and pretended to be an actress assigned the role of a princess hiding from vampires. Dad had been watching a lot of Dark Shadows rented from the library, so vampires became my latest fear and fascination.

The trees that enclosed the yard I’d disassociate in often served as my audience. I swear those trees knew all my dreams and all my secrets.

Sometimes, like today while mindlessly fiddling with work spreadsheets, I think about those trees. I even named one of them.

Was I a looney child? Perhaps. Or, perhaps I was just lonely.  

I can still smell the woodstove that warmed our home every winter if I try hard enough. Stacking the wood inside after my brother, Zack, chopped it, was one of my chores. The gloves I wore were those large work gloves made for men’s hands. My hands drowned in them as I fumbled around to grab the wood pieces and avoid splinters. The wood chips that would spill on the carpet between the door and the stove would bother me and I’d try to clean and vacuum it up as much as I could when we were done.

I was always trying to clean and tidy our home up, but it felt like no matter what I did everything was dusty and dirty and dark. Now as an adult I know that this was just my OCD beginning.

My OCD branched beyond just clean and tidiness. It kept me up at night with ruminating thoughts and fears, terrified that if I fell asleep, I wouldn’t be able to protect anyone from danger. What danger, you ask? I don’t know. My imagination ran with anything I absorbed, and I’d convince myself that just about anything could come in and hurt me. I’d say prayers in my mind repeatedly, obsessively, until I passed out with a bible underneath my pillow.

Worry was another facet of this strange obligation my mind held over me. I worried about everything.

Beneath my floorboards I could hear my parents talk after work in the bathroom while the jets in the bathtub ran. Now, I realize they probably thought none of us kids could hear them. I heard the stress, the financial insecurity, the concern about us, the biblical prophecies they discussed. I absorbed this and thought of all the ways I could help. I’d imagine myself working somewhere and secretly fixing things up around the house so that maybe my mom wouldn’t cry so much. I’d envision myself giving dad a break so that maybe he could play outside more just like he always talked about.

These worries and burdens transferred to different aspects of my life as I got older. I haven’t felt an obligation to help my parents in a long time for many reasons, but I still feel an obligation to that little girl who wouldn’t sleep unless she counted all her blessings seven times.

That house and its little woodstove are long gone. Crushed by abandoned dreams and a bulldozer. The last time I saw it was to empty its contents so that my parents could move away to their new adventure. The ghosts of children’s laughter that once rang these halls could be heard if you stood long enough and listened. You’d see pictures of a smiling family along a mantle built by Dad and silly statues that only us kids knew were from that one time we went to the Caribbean.

Crosses and the lord’s prayer still hung in the room with the woodstove that I would sneak downstairs to stare at its flames, wondering if falling asleep next to it would provide me kinder dreams.

My nightmares were so complex I’d wake up crying and run to my parents’ bed, begging to sleep with them. They’d pray over me and tell me that the devil sought me out because I was spiritually gifted. Another burden I carried: spiritually gifted.

Now, I think my nightmares were side effects of the head trauma I suffered in a freak accident as a toddler. Even as an adult, I occasionally wake up screaming. But that’s another story.

Standing in the house I’d daydream of fixing that would later turn its back on me felt intoxicating and healing at the same time. There’s something about time and acceptance and wisdom that accompanies the frontal lobe my brain now possesses.

Bitterness doesn’t coat my tongue as much as hindsight does now.

I wish I’d had gone into the yard and swung on that swing all those years ago when I was last there. I wish I could find that girl again that would proudly tell you about her daydreams without fear of judgment. I wish I had updated the trees that watched me grow and fly away. I’d let them know that I made it to another nest, my own nest, a nest that doesn’t require chopped wood or bathtub jetted confessions.

Learning I had OCD in my early 20s didn’t really hit me until my later 20s to be honest. At first, I just chuckled and thought “oh yea, that sounds right, I’ve always been a little quirky.” Recalling the birthday I had asked my grandmother for a real vacuum cleaner and not a pretend one. But it’s so much more burdensome than the need to just clean up stuff. Afterall, it stands for obsessive compulsive disorder.

I’d obsessively pray in my head and if I didn’t, I’d be convinced bad things would happen. I’d compulsively check the doorknobs in the middle of the night. My mind would convince myself that my whole family would die if I didn’t wear a certain color that day. If I didn’t pray or read my bible, I’d be eaten alive in hell. I was responsible for everything going wrong because I didn’t do xyz a certain way.

These are just some of the things present in someone like me who struggles with OCD.

Since learning more about it, I’ve realized there are different types. Like they say, though, knowledge is power. Recognizing when I’m just having a bad OCD moment has helped me tremendously. I don’t feel so weighed down by my thoughts because like my one therapist once said, “thoughts are just thoughts.” Breaking out of rumination or going against an urge to correct something is still a struggle from time to time, but at least I know when it’s a struggle and can give myself some slack.

Not sure what spurred all this. Actually, I do. It was the damn trees.

I saw a tree with a swing on this gorgeous September day and was taken back to the small girl with big brown eyes and an even bigger imagination. And so, I wrote because I believe we all owe that to ourselves. To write about our little selves. We are all still in there. Amongst the mundane, the heartache, the stress, the fatigue, somewhere inside us is a little kid with a delightful daydream. My mom, my dad, you, and me. Our little spirits are the woodstoves keeping us warm and sometimes they just need a little rekindling.  

I hope you write today.

-Liz