Okay, so now that we know what ACEs are, let’s get a little more personal.
To begin, I’d like to share with you two pictures from my childhood.
Are these the same child?
Yes.
In the photo on the left, I am dolled up and mugging for the camera. I’m not sure who took me to get my photo taken that day (probably at Sears). If it was my biological mother, she was having an exceptionally good day. The reality is that one of my aunts probably arranged the whole thing. But I look happy, round-cheeked, grinning at the camera with a twinkle in my eyes.
In the photo on the right, taken roughly a year and change after the first, I am posing for my kindergarten photo. I was grumpy partly because of that damn cowlick, but also because my home life had basically gone to hell in a handbasket in the space of a year. My mother was drinking again, heavily. She would often leave me alone in the house at night to go out to bars. One of my earliest memories is waking up alone and wandering through the darkened house. I walked outside and paced the sidewalks for what felt like hours, watching as the lights in the houses lining the street flickered off, one by one by one.
Readers, that is the loneliest I have ever felt in my life.
If we ignore the backstory and focus only on the images (lighting and photo quality aside), what remains is this: The girl on the right has lost all the baby fat from her cheeks. Her eyes are huge, dark, and sunken. She is trying to smile but her teeth are gritted. She does not look at the camera, but rather past it, as if trying to see something in the distance. You know, that old chestnut–the Thousand Yard Stare. Still a cute kid, but not the type of child you’d look at and go, “Oh, yeah, she’s doing well.”
Chronic stress changes the body in a myriad of different ways. I’ll touch on the biology of chronic stress (behavioral medicine is a fascination of mine) in the next post, but for now, let’s focus on face.
They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. If we peeked through your windows, what might we find? I’m looking forward to hearing from you, readers!