Have you ever felt trapped in your own body?
I did. I was four years old.

At the age of four (1970), I was already extremely observant of the world and the people in it.

I was looking at the world through different eyes anyway. I thought adults were terribly unpleasant creatures and had seriously started wondering who the hell had decided that they, of all people, should be put in charge of this entire ridiculous chaos planet.

Kindergarten was anything but an enjoyable environment for me to be forced to wander around in for a considerable part of the day, surrounded by confused children picking fights over toy cars and rubbing sand into each others and their own hair.

The strange thing was that I didn’t feel like a small child myself, despite the fact that I’d barely managed to acquire a set of teeth and could produce little more than “dada.”

I felt like a full-blown adult at the age of four, and I even remember knowing that I had been male not all that long ago.

It felt as though time didn’t exist and as though I was still partly standing in another life.

My brain, with a body attached to it, browsed through every situation in the classroom and all the annoying little children’s souls wandering around in it.

As if I were floating around, which I wasn’t. I was standing, but my brain was capable of roaming considerably further than the limited area on top of my neck.

Inside my brain, it also felt as though I was looking down at the children from a great height rather than seeing them at eye level. As though I still had the feeling of being inside a taller body.

But that feeling began to crumble radically.

I desperately tried to make contact with the busy little four-year-old brats, but for obscure reasons, that turned out to fail spectacularly.

They didn’t even look at me, which left me with a somewhat pathetic, uncomfortable, bruised-ego kind of feeling.

It felt as though there was a long tunnel between me and the children there. When I looked at them, I looked at them from an enormous distance and with an adult perspective, as though something wasn’t quite right.

In flashes, I remembered a previous life. Absolutely no idea whether that life was connected to the time I saw the old man sitting in the chair.

Suddenly, it began to dawn on me that I, as an adult, had been dumped among a bunch of obnoxious small children in a life I didn’t recognize.

Girls didn’t even look at me. Why the hell not? I looked like a cute girl, if I may say so myself, so why did nobody want anything to do with me?

It wasn’t exactly as though I spontaneously went around spitting in everyone’s face like an overstressed llama.

In one super-fast flash I remember thinking, Hm, I never used to have this problem. And it felt as though, in that other life, I had been enormously popular with that particular sex.

So attention from girls was nonexistent. Bummer.

Holy shit, at least inside my head there was some inexplicable language that I could feel was saying some seriously intense shit, accompanied by one hell of a shock and disappointment.

“This isn’t going to work in this life” was the literal thought at that very moment and that has stayed with me throughout my entire life.

Referring to my future life, which I somehow felt wasn’t going to be nearly as successful as my previous one. Whatever that was.

Suddenly, I stood there completely frozen to the spot and felt acutely claustrophobic inside my own body.

At that moment, I knew I was going to have to sit this one out for a while, along with all the life circumstances that came with it.