What did you play? in A Childhood Lost

Kids make up stories in their imaginative play about what they experience. It might be de-personalized (actually I think it almost always is) and roles reversed, or maybe not. It is concerning to me that so many parents who have their kids in “therapy” complain that all they do in there for an hour is “just play”. Parents think that by just playing in the therapists office, their child is not communicating anything of value to the therapist, nor receiving anything of value from there therapy. They seem to complain about the cost of therapy for their child to go in and “just play” for an hour- and it costs them the parent 150 or 200 or 250 dollars.

I remember playing with my best friend in the 5th grade, with stuffed animals, puppets, figurines, etc. A little old to be playing with such things? Perhaps. I was self conscious about it. I think my friend was, as well. But, we had each other’s support to rely on and, I think, that was enough affirmation to not really care about what the others thought.
We would constantly acquire new characters to share, and inevitably, we made up a personality for them. We gave them a life, a name, a history, an origin story, a role to play out, etc. Each one was unique, and we had our favorites and our least-favorites.
My friend and I rarely, extremely rarely, broke the illusion. There was a reason and an explanation for the character going away to the backpack after recess. For why they couldn’t go with us into the bathroom. For why we had forgotten one at home that day. For virtually everything. One of the only times I ever remember her breaking the illusion (and thereby acknowledging that the illusion is created and sustained by us), was when she asked me,
“why do your animals always end up being shy?”

It was a simple and straightforward question, and I genuinely believe that she as curious. But the effect that it had on me was devastation. I felt at once, that the illusion had been broken, that I was being recognized for having created and sustained it, and that it told her something intrinsic, fundamental, and vulnerably flawed about me. The flood of humiliation, self-consciousness, embarrassment, and terror I felt was… indescribably awful. Now, I can only manage to remember a tiny glimpse of that experience.
Looking back, I can clearly see that I was acting out in my play, characters that came to me as open, bright, vivacious, exuberant, expressive beings and over time they became quiet, sometimes mute, sometimes paralyzed, sometimes maimed, shy, depressed, suppressed, or terrorized. I made them that way.
And it was because that was the way I was made.