Yeah, I Was THAT Five-Year-Old

Remember your first days of school? The sea of kids. The improvised colored paper name tag pinned to your clothes on arrival. The way the teacher looked at you. The way the lunch kits smelled. The unknown threat of how your life would come to an end.

Really?

Yes, really.

This might be as close to a credible confession as you’re gonna get from yours truly, so stay with me on this one.

I never told anyone else.

Any adults that is.

Why I thought newly formed four- and five-year-old barely ink dry friendships were valid and trustworthy I’ll never know. Not sure if even my friends back then will remember those conversations.

I could have been the poster child for a couple of concepts but an interdimensional mystic philosopher with an overdeveloped anxiety issue could be numero uno.

Or maybe not.

In retrospect, I believe there were other reasons.

As children, we all had a couple of worries, right?

Unless brain dead, socialization gifts you stress. Infuses its tendrils into pure tender young minds.

"Here, I bequeath thee this fear for getting teased/chased/beat up after school."

"Free worry voucher about lima beans or Brussel sprouts with dinner!"

"Ready for the mega-present anxiety about the saucy neighborhood dog who attacks, kills, and drags you to subterranean depths where no one can find your body?"

In my early years of education, I became that child who remained tactical about my anxiety. I only had one (until flying roaches crept in later.) I also remember being at a farm once with my mom as a young child and while she chatted outside with the farmer, a humongous rat ran across my feet. I screamed and cried to high heaven and received nothing but silent stares. Could both adults have missed the gigantic rat and thought my spontaneous outburst a sign of mental instability?

Flying under the radar became my M.O. all those years ago. That’s why no adult ever found out.

How does a child inherently know when a topic is taboo?

Haven’t a clue. I suspect I just did.

So I waited and pounced during class free time, asking my classmates if they were afraid of dying and what would be the best way for it to happen.

Unbeknownst to me, my peers were a bloodthirsty lot who didn’t seem bothered at all by my philosophical question and were quite flippant and sometimes graphic in their responses.

No one else was afraid of dying!

AAARRRRGGGHHH!!!

This bothered me even more!

Silently of course.

So I ‘interviewed’ more students to get the responses I wanted—needed—to show that someone else my age was as terrified as I was of the grim reaper and how it would reap.

How did I even manage to fixate on death in the first place when I watched 'zilch much' of it on television and there were only three stations back in those days?

It amazes me that I understood mortality. Maybe I read it in a book somewhere. I was an avid reader.

I did come across a few interviewees who needed time to think about my question, evidence of face validity that they had never considered the subject before. I called that a win.

But the overwhelming majority opted for being shot, with a handful opting for being stabbed or killed while they slept. May have been one who opted for swift strangulation.

Reflecting back on my impromptu qualitative research, no one thought of reaching old age and dying of that. There were variations of being unexpectedly shot or stabbed so you mercifully wouldn’t see it coming. I don’t think even one person mentioned passing away peacefully in their sleep. In all fairness, I didn't know that was possible back then.

We were Generation X-ers who did not know we were Generation X-ers.

Destined to buck the system. Did my five-year-old mind oddly conceive death as part of the system I could buck?

Hard to say. There was a lot going on in those school early years and long-term memory storage was hard to come by.

I do have a theory.

Reincarnation.

I had a horrible death in my previous life and thus I was predisposed to be preoccupied about it early in this one.

Creepy.

More prima facie evidence of my predisposition to hate horror movies if I had lived one.

Yeah, I was THAT five-year-old. Sweet and adorable on the outside, carrying the weight of horrific downright macabre death scenarios inside while I played on the swings.

Go figure.

Somewhere after early years, that worry somehow faded. Then in my thirties, I had a sudden reincarnation full flash extended version memory of my death in that former life. It was gruesome. Bloody. Torturous and immensely traumatizing.

No wonder five-year-old me was spooked!

But I won’t tell.

Not gonna be carrying the label, “Yeah, she was THAT thirty-something-year-old” to my grave.

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