Written by Eric S

5 Going on 35

I believe my mental health journey began at around the same time in life when human children become self-conscious (4-5 years old).

For it was during this period that I was hit by a car while riding my tricycle on the normally quiet residential street in front of my childhood home. My actual memory of the event and its aftermath is very sketchy. The story I have told about it over the years incorporated the narratives of my mother, my father, and of an older boy who lived down the street. I have also embellished it for dramatic purposes over the years. Here is the story:

It was the summer of 1969. I was riding a vintage tricycle–it had a high seat and an unusually large front wheel. A teenage kid up the street got high, stole his Dad’s car, and took it for a joyride. He came around the corner and wove up the street, hitting me along the way. Because the tricycle was tall, the impact threw me upward instead of forward. I was launched ‘as high as the telephone pole’, then ‘landed head first on the hood’, and ‘rolled in front of the car as it hit a retaining wall of stone in front of the Lacombe’s house’. Had the wall not stopped the car, I ‘would have been crushed under it’. My mother heard the crash and ran outside. She found me on the grass in front of the car. Someone called an ambulance. The owner of the Supertest gas station down the street heard the crash and arrived in his tow truck. He transported me, bleeding on my mother’s lap, and my mother to the Riverside Hospital E.R.. I got X-rayed, stitched-up, and was on a gurney waiting for a room when my mother came through the E.R. doors, my father trailing, and exclaimed in tears, “Oh my baby!”. Prone on the gurney, with a nurse attending, I replied, “I’m not a baby. I’m five years old!”. Then I remember lying in bed in a hospital room, bruised, stinging from scrapes all over my body and from a sutured gash on my scalp, and my mother bringing a fruit basket from the parents of the driver. Another gift was from the parents of the older kid down the street, the one who said I “flew up as high as the telephone pole”. It was a Pope-on-a-rope bar of soap. Very odd. I also remember the discomfort of the rectal thermometer. For some reason they decided I was too young for the more dignified type. And beyond that, I cannot fill in any of the gaps. I do recall being a bit of a celebrity during the first day or two of Grade 1, as news of the accident travelled through the neighbourhood to my elementary school. It was my first chance to practice the narrative.

But what do I actually remember? Very little, in fact. Only the smell of my own blood as my mother cradled my bleeding head on her lap during the short ride in the tow truck to the hospital. I remember the scene in the E.R. when my mother came through the front doors. I recall laying in the hospital bed, mostly alone with the exception of nurse visits and my parents. The chocolate bars in the fruit basket. The strange soap on a rope. And the cold, invasive thermometer.

Thus began my mental health journey–being hit by a car when I was five.

What is profound to me is that the biggest impact on my mental health was not the incident itself but rather the re-telling of it, how the narrative shaped my relationships with family members, friends, and the world, and how my subjectivity as a survivor wove itself into my identity at an age when children typically develop meta-awareness.

I have a vague memory of telling classmates about my accident at the start of Grade 1, only a couple of months after it happened. I showed them the scar on my scalp. I have a dent in my skull, which is fun to probe with curious fingers! It was all very new, and I enjoyed being the subject of the attention of my cohort for a short while.

Philippe Rochat, a developmental psychologist renowned for his work on the development of a sense of self in early childhood, described five stages of self-awareness that form from infancy to the ages of 4 to 5. It begins with confusion, then differentiation, followed in order by situation, identification, permanence, and, finally, self-consciousness or ‘meta’ self-awareness.

I’m going to skip straight ahead to the final stage, meta self-awareness, as it is most relevant to my own mental health journey. Rochat explains (emphasis added):

The self is now recognized not only from a first person perspective, but also from a third person’s. Individuals are not only aware of what they are but how they are in the mind of others: How they present themselves to the public eye (Goffman, 1959). The public outlook on the self is simulated for further evaluation of how one is perceived and valued by others. The result of this evaluation, more often than not is either a devaluation or a delusion, linked to so-called ‘‘self-conscious’’ emotions or attitudes such as pride or shame. A self-conscious self is expressed: an entity that is simulated and projected in the mind of others (722).

Source: Rochat, P. (2003). ‘Five levels of self-awareness as they unfold early in life.’ Consciousness and Cognition 12 (2003) 717–731. PDF available here.

At this stage, at the tender age of 4 or 5, the child learns to imagine a self that they believe others can see, or, more importantly, want to see, and will project this persona to the influential figures in their growing world: parents, siblings, teachers, and friends. The more influential the figure, the more effort the child invests in perpetuating the outward expression of the ‘self-conscious self’.

To witness her 5 year-old son bleeding and broken on the grass after being smacked by a 2 ton mass of moving metal is any mother’s worst nightmare come real. I do believe that, at the time, the incident heaped far more trauma upon my mother than it did on me. After all, my mind blocked-out the impact of the car, and my most vivid memories are of being cradled by my mother, cared for by nurses, and enjoying chocolate from a basket of fruit.

My mother’s way of coping with this trauma was through affirmation that it was a miracle I did not suffer brain injury (at least, the doctors at the time believed I did not!), and that for some reason I did not die that day. My father noted that if I was riding a regular tricycle, which would have seated me much lower, I probably would have been killed on impact as opposed to the tricycle taking most of the impact while I was launched up into the air. My mother would add that landing head-first on the hood of the car was like a landing on a trampoline—I was thrown forward. And had the retaining wall not stopped the car, it would have rolled over me.

The fact is—I was very lucky. The narrative of how lucky I was transformed into a ‘miracle story’. This didn’t happen because my parents were religious, for they were not. The source of this narrative was my parents’ trauma and the value they placed on the fact that they did not lose their son that day. As a parent, you don’t need religion to believe it miraculous that you could have (perhaps, should have) lost a child and for whatever inexplicable reasons did not.

And so it was that I would begin a mental health journey through the development of a persona that was miraculously ‘saved’ from a traumatic event that should have killed me.

From the time of the trauma to my teens, I experienced a strange satisfaction from hearing my mother re-tell the story of the accident from her perspective. Part of me appreciated hearing it, again, because I had a tendency to forget the details. I do wonder if the forgetting was a symptom of PTSD avoidance behaviour. Another part of me felt special, needed, and very much loved when I heard her re-live the day through her own memory. There would always be an audience, which is important to note—our family together in the living room or at the dinner table, or a friend I brought home from school, or, later on, a girlfriend I would want to introduce to my parents. Asking my mother to re-tell the story seemed like a regular social passage.

I didn’t consciously realize it at the time, but I was creating dependency on my persona as ‘saved for a purpose’. What began as a persona I would project to experience my mother’s love was later integrated to become ‘how I see myself’. This transformation, the integration, probably didn’t take that long to fully process. Maybe a year or two? Maybe even just a few months? I can’t say for sure, but I do know that at some point I came to believe that I was the miraculous survivor of an accident due to an impossible collision of many very unlikely circumstances and conditions. I doesn’t matter whether these conditions were accurately described or not—we are, after all, the product of the stories we tell about ourselves.

Age the tender age of 5, Eric the Saviour was born.

There was often chaos in the family home. I have one slightly younger sister and two who are 7 and 10 years older. So, when I was 5-10 years old, my elder sisters were both teens and understandably demanding of much of my parents’ time and energy.

It was not unusual for me to spend hours alone in my room, reading books, playing with toys, putting together model cars, planes, or boats. I felt most comfortable when my world shrunk down to a very local space. Perhaps this was what felt safe for me.

There were three other kids my age on the street, and we spent a good chunk of each summer sitting up in a maple tree, playing hide and seek, and so on.

I developed a rich, imaginative inner landscape. I did well at school and, at the age of 10, before grade 5, was tested and moved into the ‘Enriched Program’ of the school. These Enriched kids would be my cohort for the next four years. We were ostracized by the mainstream students. We were nerds, dorks, and whatever other derisive epithets kids could conjure in the 1970s.

But I didn’t feel like I belonged with the Enriched kids, either. I was most comfortable as a loner. I needed to be the smartest in the class, and clearly I was not. On one hand, I wanted to be exceptional; on the other, I didn’t feel like I fit in, with anyone.

At 13, I was already feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. Now add hormones and a sense of not being ‘excellent’ enough, and the result is an egomaniac with crushing self-doubt.

Two years later, I would introduce my brain and body to alcohol. It would transform me. In the context of my story above, the best way I can describe the feeling that alcohol would give me is that I became the one who was saved for a purpose–and everyone could see that. I felt beautiful and I believed that others saw my specialness.

Ingesting alcohol took everything twisted-up inside me, in my ‘meta’ awareness, and not only straightened it all out but also elevated it all to an ideal. It was something that I could never recapture—I chased that perfection for 23 years until I ended up in a treatment centre. That chase will be the subject of a future post.