Part One of: The Pull

I was two and a half years old when a dog knocked me over and I landed spine first on a curb outside my house.

My whole body stopped working.

For months.

I know this because it was always talked about. Openly. Matter of factly. The story of what happened to Sophie when she was small. Passed around the family like a piece of furniture everyone knew the history of but nobody quite understood.

Including me.

I still don’t fully understand it. I have my medical records now. I am piecing it together slowly, carefully, the way you piece together something that happened to a body you were living in but too young to narrate.

What I know is this.

For months, the body that was supposed to be mine didn’t work.

And then it did again. Mostly. Not completely. It left things behind, that fall. Permanent things. The kind that don’t show up on the outside but live quietly in the body regardless, in the nervous system, in the way everything processes and responds and sometimes doesn’t.

I was put back into the world.

Into a nursery.

At three.

And I got under a table.

Not once. Regularly. From the very first day because I hated that place from the moment I arrived. I hated the teachers. They treated me differently, not kindly differently, the other kind, and eventually my mother was told by another parent just how horrible they were with me. I moved schools not long after.

But before that.

The table.

I would get underneath it and I would watch.

Not upset. Not acting out. Just present in the only way that felt survivable. Below the level everyone else was operating at. Hidden in plain sight. Observing everything from a place nobody thought to look.

And when they noticed,

they didn’t come to find out why.

They just made me come out.

No curiosity. No gentleness. No adult crouching down to ask what was happening for the small person who kept disappearing under the furniture.

Just: come out.

Comply.

Be where we can see you.

I understand that three year old completely now.

She wasn’t being difficult.

She was doing the most logical thing available to her.

She had spent months in a body that wouldn’t move, trapped and frustrated inside something she couldn’t control, surrounded by people who talked about it openly but didn’t really understand it. Who loved her and still couldn’t quite reach the place inside her where the experience actually lived.

And then she was put in a room full of noise and people and teachers who treated her differently and expected her to just… be there. Normally. Like a child who hadn’t already learned, before she had words for it, that the world was not reliably safe.

That bodies betray you without warning.

That the people around you can love you and still not reach you.

That you are, at the most fundamental level, alone inside your own experience in a way that is very hard to explain and almost impossible to make anyone else feel.

So she got under the table.

And she watched.

And nobody asked why.

That is where the gap begins.

Not in the accident. Not in the paralysis. Not in any single event you can point to and say: there, that’s the moment.

The gap is what happens when a nervous system learns, before it has language, that existence is precarious. That the body cannot be trusted. That safety is not guaranteed. That the people who love you will talk about what happened to you openly and still not understand it. That the teachers will treat you differently and when you find the only strategy that makes the unbearable bearable they will just make you come out.

And here is the thing about gaps.

They do not stay empty.

They cannot.

The human mind is not designed for sustained emptiness. It is designed for meaning, connection, regulation, relief. When those things are absent, when they were never reliably present to begin with, the psyche does what it always does.

It adapts.

It finds something that works.

Not something healthy. Not something safe. Not something that will look good explained to a therapist ten years from now.

Something that works. Right now. Today. In the body. In the nervous system. In the place where the gap lives.

I spent sixteen years finding things that worked.

Drugs. Sex. Intensity. Anything that turned the volume up loud enough to drown out the frequency I’d been stuck on since before I had words. Anything that made different feel, temporarily, like it belonged somewhere. Anything that regulated a nervous system that had been dysregulated since before the table, since before the nursery, since before I had language for any of it.

I am not telling you this as confession.

I am not telling you this as cautionary tale.

I am telling you this because this series is about why people do what they do. Why people offend. Why others are drawn to them. Why certain dynamics make a terrible, perfect kind of sense to certain nervous systems.

And I cannot write about that honestly from the outside.

Because I was never on the outside.

I was under the table.

Watching. Surviving. Reaching for whatever made the gap feel smaller.

And everything I have learned since, about offending behaviour, about attraction to danger, about the psychology of the pull, I learned first in my own body. In my own choices. In my own long and sometimes devastating education in what happens when a gap goes unfilled for long enough.

This is that education.

Not a clinical framework dressed up as personal writing.

Not a trauma narrative dressed up as analysis.

Both. Equally. At the same time.

Because that is the only honest way to write about this.

It feels like drowning.

Except you’re still breathing.

And nobody can tell.

That is where this starts.

Under a table.

At three years old.

Already on the wrong frequency.

Already carrying something that arrived before I had any say in it.

Already trying to figure out how to survive in a world that had already shown me, before I had words for it, exactly how precarious everything was.

The gap was always there.

The only question was what I was going to fill it with.

Next: The First Time It Made Sense