#1 The Trouble That I’m Always In...
On this tumble down the rabbit hole AutCasts explores confusion, crises and sensory overload through my childhood obsession with Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951).
Alice, drawn in her iconic blue and white pinafore, blond hair and black headband, sits on a rock in the middle of a dark wood sobbing. Alone, confused and desperate to understand her perturbing encounters in Wonderland, Alice sings:
‘I give myself very good advice but I very seldom follow it,
that explains the trouble that I’m always in.’
As a nine year old, I knew these lines from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) off by heart. I received a copy of the Read-Along book and cassette version of the cartoon for Christmas that year and followed the instructions to ‘see the pictures, hear the tape and read the book’ to the letter.
By the time my recently separated mother took us on our first ever foreign holiday to France the following summer, I already knew the 24 page text word for word. Driving from the La Harve ferry port to the foothills of the Alps in our battered Ford Fiesta, I subjected my mother and brothers to repeated plays of the tape while I sang along with every word. When my mother could take no more of the White Rabbit exclaiming ‘I’m Late, I’m Late’ or The Mad Hatter’s Very Merry Unbirthday song, she insisted on silence or gritted her teeth through my unabashed renditions of James Brown’s ‘I Feel Good.’
Though The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were among the first movies I ever saw in the theatre, I was not particularly enamored with Disney’s put-upon princesses. I preferred the adventures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to anything that involved girls in cumbersome dresses or fish tails whose futures depended on the whims of a generic Prince Charming. And yet, something about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland captured my attention like few other movies.
Alice is either too big or two small for her surrounds, she says and does the wrong thing, speaks too much or too little, too low or too high, she makes repeated cultural faux pas and pisses off the people in charge. Alice and the creatures of Wonderland all speak the same language but somehow they are missing vital messages. She can barely find the words to explain her frustrations and few of the inhabitants of Wonderland have the interest or patience to listen.
The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (1951) is a Disney animated adaptation of the classic Lewis Carroll children’s book, where a young girl, Alice, falls down a rabbit hole and enters the strange and mysterious Wonderland, populated by odd creatures, talking flowers and ruled over by the tyrannical Queen of Tarts.
Welcome to Wonderland…
Unlike Alice, however, I didn’t have to go to Wonderland to experience these crises. This was my everyday reality in a world where my senses were under constant assault, where I struggled to understand the rules of social interaction and rarely grasped why people were so often mad at me. The sounds, smells, lights, tastes and textures of the universe beyond my body were often too much to bear. They led to meltdowns which were mistaken for tantrums or shutdowns which were mistaken for sulking. My sensory difficulties were ascribed to picky eating or fussiness, burn-out for laziness and executive dysfunction for wilful messiness, disorganisation and slovenliness. Meanwhile, I assumed that everyone around me had the same difficulties with loud noises, or squishy foods, or scratchy clothes, but they were just getting on with it without the fuss.
By the time Alice came into my world I had already earned a reputation for myself at home and school as ‘contrary’ at best, and ‘bold’ at worst. I was perpetually in trouble for behaviors unequivocally labelled as ‘bad.’ Parents, teachers, aunts, uncles and other responsible adults often accused me of being cheeky or insolent, of giving smart answers, talking back or not listening. I was regularly informed that my face was wrong, my voice was wrong or my body was wrong. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you’ or ‘take that look off your face’ where instructions hurled at me on a regular basis. These contradictory demands only confused me even more and I did not have the words to explain how uncomfortable, sometimes even painful, eye contact could be nor that I was rarely in control nor aware of what my face was doing. I responded to my infractions with increasingly desperate ‘I’m sorrys’ or ‘I didn’t mean it.’ But, the entreaties appeared unconvincing when the same things happened over and over again.
Just as Alice lurches from one exasperating encounter to another, each time thinking she has figured things out only to make a misstep or say the wrong thing at the wrong time, I could make friends but struggled to hold on to them. I would fall out of one friend group to be picked up by another until they became tired of me or I did or said the wrong thing. I was an object of and a participant in bullying. More often than not I simply watched the girls in my class skipping or hopping through their games from the edges of the playground, wanting desperately to join in, but unsure how to go about it. Even when they asked me to play, I would often say no. I was more afraid of messing things up than remaining an alone observer on the sidelines.
Loneliness is a dark wood…
I was a shy, sleepy, daydreamer who felt out of place and out of sync with the world around me often. I buried my loneliness in the fantasies of my favourite books or the worlds I created for myself with my stuffed animals or legions of barbies. Rarely brave enough to venture into the nearby woods by myself, I would instead retreat to my room to cry and berate myself, like Alice, for all the ways I had got it wrong, all the ways I had failed to be good. I clung to Alice’s words for comfort:
‘If I listened earlier I wouldn’t be here (…)
I should have known the price I’d have to pay.’
Great post. Totally relate.