I am a middle child.
I am a middle child.
No, this isn’t an essay about how I always felt left out at the dinner table growing up. This is, rather, a short exposé about how my deep-seated feelings of insecurity rooted within my identity complex as a middle child led me to learn to find safety and security within myself, rather than searching for it in the outside world — a tool I believe vital for every individual on this earth, regardless of where they fall in their sibling line up.
We have all been in situations where our bodies go on high alert, even though it rationally doesn’t make sense for us to feel unsafe. As the Cleveland Clinic explains, “Without you even telling it what to do, your body is assessing what’s going on around you and determining your options on how you most likely could survive the event” (What Happens to Your Body During the Fight or Flight Response). Regardless of if you are getting chased by a lion that is powerful enough to eat you alive, or just talking to your crush and trying not to say anything wrong, “{Y}our brain does not know the difference {between a “small threat” and a “big threat”}– it is only concerned with one thing: ‘Is this a THREAT?’” (Negative Thinking- What Your Poor Brain Doesn’t Know…). If your body does not feel safe, regardless of how “rational” it is to feel safe, your body will respond accordingly. You cannot convince your body to stop trying to protect you, because that is quite literally what it is made to do.
I grew up in a very loving household. I had two parents who did everything they could to provide the best opportunities for me and my siblings — me and my seven siblings, that is (yep, you heard that right). I was given ample opportunity to succeed, and always told I would grow up to be something great. From the outside looking in, my childhood was beautiful… and it was. I was loved, I was cared for, and I was given all the resources I needed to succeed in my chosen endeavors. But, I never felt safe. Not because there were any rational perceived physical threats, but because no amount of external security was ever enough to coax my psyche into feeling safe. I did not feel safe, internally.
As a young girl, I was not emotionally or intellectually intelligent enough to understand what it meant to feel as though I was an outsider in my own family… but my body could feel it. Deep down, I could feel it. My spirit sensed it, and my soul was tempered by it. Before I even knew what confines were, I was learning how to navigate my way through them, with my guard up, of course, because I did not feel as though I was safe enough to let them down. My body was constantly in fight or flight mode, trying to protect me from the outside world, even though I was not mature enough to understand what there was to be protected from. I was solely existing, navigating, and maneuvering my way through life, figuring out what I was to say and how I was to act, without ever really asking myself what I wanted. I now realize why I was never able to step into my truth until later in life; my body was to afraid to take risks in that way because it already felt at risk, inside of itself.
A good way to explain this phenomenon that I encountered growing up as a middle child in a large family, and the phenomenon that many people experience growing up in an environment, or a world, where they do not feel safe, is with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, represented by the triangular pyramid diaphragm above. Maslow believed certain needs must be satisfied before an individual can tend to those needs higher up on the pyramid; one does not strive for self esteem, for example, without first fulfilling their physiological need for air and water. Taking Maslow’s work a step further to explain my insecurity as a middle child, I believe certain needs are able to be physically met without being emotionally fulfilled. Though I had everything I could have ever needed growing up- my physiological and safety needs physically met- I was always stuck on the second tier because I did not feel safe inwardly or emotionally.
No amount of “I love you”s from my parents ever made me feel truly unconditionally loved, because there was always a doubt in my mind whether the gesture was truly encompassing. It had nothing to do with my parents, or anything they ever did to me. I was just in this constant cycle of trying to protect myself from the opponents that deemed me less than, be they middle child syndrome, in this situation, or later on in life, the Patriarchy and capitalism — the outside sources that, whether I was conscious of it or not, made me feel as though I had to fight for my place on this earth. I never had the freedom to fully express myself because my body was just trying to protect me, inwardly.
I believe our bodies know. I believe they can feel when we are being oppressed, even before or without our minds ever becoming consciously aware of the oppression. Sure, mentality plays a huge part in our physiological response- many studies have proven the power of our thoughts over our regulatory response patterns- but our bodies take in the climate of our environment, regardless of whether we are conscious of what that entails. This is why it is so important for us to befriend our bodies — to learn to listen to our bodies, and seek wisdom and direction from them. They know so much more than we do.
We live in a world that very often tries to convince us to play devil’s advocate against our own bodies, leaving many of us to go through life never feeling safe enough to let down our guards and express ourselves the way we want to. So many people never get to live out their truth because as the trauma manifests through their bodies, they get stuck in the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Regardless of what their external circumstances look like, their bodies can sense insecurity, and they react accordingly.
Eventually I decided I needed to find a way to create a home inside of myself, because I realized I was never going to be able to feel fully at home in the outside world. All I wanted was to have somewhere I could escape to and find peace, even if that place was just inside of my own mind. If there is anything I have learned from my years of feeling a lack of belonging and security in my own household and in the outside world, it’s to prioritize myself, since no one else is going to do it for me. I have to take action to support my mental health, because no one else is going to fight for it’s protection (I swear sometimes the world is fighting against it, but that is a conversation for another day).
Learning how to find solace within my own mind and body has been the most empowering skill I have acquired in my life. Regardless of whether I feel completely secure in my surrounding environment (which most often is not the case), I know I can always retreat into my own mind and find refuge. I can create a safe space for myself to express, regardless of what the world tells me I need to be.
For so long, I searched for a home in physical spaces, in other people, in things or in passions, and all along I ignored the very vessel that was guiding me through it all– my body. The most powerful tool I will ever own. The place I finally found home.
As Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius so beautifully articulated many, many years ago, “Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.”
I am at home inside of my own mind.
I am my own home.
Works Cited
“What Happens to Your Body During the Fight or Flight Response?” Healthessentials, Cleveland Clinic, 20 Aug. 2021, health.clevelandclinic.org/what-happens-to-your-body-during-the-fight-or-flight-response/.
“Negative Thinking- What Your Poor Brain Doesn’t Know…” Mindfulness & Clinical Psychology Solutions, 19 May 2021, mi-psych.com.au/what-your-brain-doesnt-know/.
Mcleod, Saul. “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Simply Psychology, 29 Dec. 2020, www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html.
