ActBlog no. 1: The Valley of Amazement
At the age of eight, Lulu was already determined to be true to herself. When she was young, she was born with an extra finger in both hands. Her grandmother wanted to get it operated before leaving the hospital because according to her, there were no gloves that could fit into six fingers. However, her parents, being free-thinkers, didn’t want her fingers to be operated. But, the time came that her fingers got operated because an old friend of her father, Mr. Maubert, who was a former concert pianist, convinced them. He told Lulu’s parents that if they didn’t want Lulu to be playing the tambourine, due to lack of suitable instruments, they should get it amputated. Mr. Maubert was the one who proudly informed Lulu that he had influenced the decision.
She was shocked to find out that part of her was considered undesirable especially by her own parents. It had made her fearful that people could change parts of her without her consent. Thus, she decided that she wants to get to know herself better so she could be able to protect her attributes from people who don’t understand her. She called this process “My Pure Self-Being”.
In the beginning, she had only started to learn about her likes and dislikes of different things. She also gathered secrets of herself and things that had hurt her, and the reason as to why they were to be kept personal. As she aged, she added features of herself- intelligence, opinions of others, fears, and discomforts- which she later found out were called worries. When her menstruation came, her mother said that it was “the biology that led to your existence” and had made it sound like she was a mindless blob and her entry in the world means that she had took on a personality shaped thorough her parents’ guidance.
