I spent a lot of time in the woods as a child. And I mean a lot.

I grew up in a very small town in Northern BC, Canada. So small they don't even know the population of it, then or now. My elementary school had under 100 kids and about eleven kids my age, four classrooms of mixed ages, and most of them are still friends of mine on Facebook. There wasn't much to do other than be in the woods, ride bikes, or do whatever could be done outside until dinner. So the woods became my second home.

I was mostly treasure hunting. But I was also thinking. Contemplating. Processing things I didn't yet have words for.

I didn't know then that this was the beginning of a very long journey of learning to leave my body. Of teaching myself, before I even had language for it, that the inside of my own head was safer than the world around me.

I grew up in what I would call a fundamentalist Christian household. Everything that wasn't Christian was occult. One of my special interests has always been things that feel magical: fairies, the woods, mystery. And growing up, all of that was evil. Everything I was drawn to, everything that lit me up, was something to be ashamed of.

That's a particular kind of weight to put on a child's inner world. When what lives inside you is named wrong from the beginning, you learn quickly to keep it hidden. You learn to go somewhere else with it.

I had a decent BS detector even then. Gay people going to hell? My aunt is a lesbian and she is an angel of a human, so no. Tattoos as a portal for the devil? My dad has tattoos, so I'm calling that one out too. Anything that wasn't rooted in love and acceptance, I questioned. Thank god I'm AuDHD, because that moral clarity seemed to come built in. But the questioning cost something. There was no room to make decisions for myself about belief, about right and wrong, about who I was allowed to be. That confusion had to go somewhere.

And the environment outside my house wasn't softer. Small communities carry a lot of pain. Violence, abuse, neglect. In my household alone there were eight to ten of us at any given time: mixed family, mixed race, foster kids, adopted kids, everything in between. A jungle of children, most of them carrying things children shouldn't have to carry.

I remember going to a friend's house where her parents chain-smoked so heavily that when I walked in I couldn't see them on the couch six feet in front of me. I watched that same friend's dad die of lung cancer not long after. He was a beautiful human who made some painful choices, and my friends life didn't get easier from there.

Other friends of mine were sexually assaulted. Many of them, in fact. Including me, at different points in those years. Some were hit at home on a regular basis. And remember: there were only eleven kids my age. Under a hundred in the whole school. This wasn't the background noise of a large city. This was my whole world.

When the whole world is unsafe, a child's nervous system does the only logical thing: it starts building an exit. Not a physical one. An internal one.

The teachers didn't help. They saw behaviour and nothing underneath it. I was always being sent to the office, always being told I was too much, not enough, not trying hard enough. No one ever tried to regulate me, recognise me, or understand what was actually going on in my life. I struggled to read, not because I couldn't, but because my ADHD made focusing almost impossible. Nobody built me up around that. I got more than my fair share of criticism, and for a neurodivergent brain, the research tells us we receive somewhere around twenty thousand more negative messages than our neurotypical peers by the time we reach adulthood. I believe it. Double it and you might be closer to my experience. The criticism at school and at home felt endless.

I have an exceptionally creative brain, and I have always felt connected to things beyond my five senses. So dissociation was, looking back, almost inevitable. Not a flaw. A very logical response to a world that felt consistently overwhelming, unsafe, and impossible to make sense of from the inside.

There were three ways it showed up, and I can see them clearly now even though I couldn't name them then.

The first was vigilance that never switched off. I've had insomnia my whole life, probably because once your nervous system learns that nighttime is when unsafe things happen, it stops trusting sleep. I remember lying awake before I was ten, night after night, staring up at the sky. Not peacefully. Just watching. Waiting. My body doing its job of keeping me safe even when there was nothing left to guard against. But it wasn't just at night. There was a hyperness that was anxiety that also never switched off. I needed help regulating, that I never got. I just got shamed.

The second was sensitivity that learned to hide. I have always felt things deeply, all the way through and in every cell of my being. But I grew up in a household where sensitivity wasn't taken seriously, and worse, where it was mocked. I remember recording myself crying into a handheld recorder after my cat was put down. I loved that cat so much and I missed him so much and I needed somewhere to put it. My brother and my mother were listening through my door and burst out laughing. I froze.

I don't think I cried openly again until my twenties.

No person should be mocked for feeling. But for someone with my neurotype, that kind of shame lands differently. It doesn't just sting. It teaches. I couldn't separate their behaviour from what it meant about me. So I decided it meant I was the problem. Everything turned inward. Everything got swallowed.

A sensitive child who is laughed at for feeling doesn't stop feeling. She just stops letting anyone see it. She goes somewhere else to do it.

The third was the woods. Fantasy. The internal world that became more real, more welcoming, and more mine than anything in the external one. I dissociated in my attention, I dissociated in my body, and I dissociated in my mind. The woods were where all three could breathe. I was half raised by trees, and I mean that in the most literal and loving way I can.

I know now that what I was doing out there was regulating. Processing. Surviving. When you have a hard time living in this world, you live out of it. And for a long time, that was the one of the only tools I had.

I also want to say this, and I want to say it without anger, because most of it has already moved through me: none of the adults in my life knew they were causing as much harm as they did. They were modelling what they had been taught. There are good shitty parents and shitty good parents, and the line between them is usually just access to information and support they never got either. Those of us in this generation are doing a lot of work to break these patterns, and we are doing it in a world that is exhausting and relentless and barely gives us space to breathe, let alone process a whole childhood.

But the work is worth doing. Coming home to this body, slowly, layer by layer, has been one of the most worthwhile journeys of my life.

When you come back into your body as a sensitive person, something shifts. You start to feel the gift underneath all that pain. You feel deeper. You smell things more beautifully. You see more colours in the world. You hear beyond the surface of the world. There is a connection available to you, inside your own body and your own presence, that cannot be accessed from somewhere else.

The woods kept me safe before I could safely be in my body and feel like I was home. But home was always here, inside this body, waiting.

If you spent your childhood somewhere else too, I see you. The escape made sense. It kept you here.

And now, if you're ready, we can start the journey back.

Much love,

Kat

Photo Credit: Hernan Sanchez on Unsplash