however are permanent, and sometimes even late in life, we still feel the pain, each of us merely children grown older.
At an age when children are perhaps their meanest, he was stuck in what seemed like a decade long game of tag, and was “it” the entire time. It is a time in our development when we are developing friendships and honing social skills, and he was emotionally relegated to standing with his nose in the corner, while others were recognizing aptitudes and abilities and defining their image of self, his image in the school picture was not the image of the cute boy it had been, and the internal disagreement between the innately confident kid, and the unattractive one in the mirror damaged him beyond his appearance and would have long lasting effects in terms of self-confidence years after these events were in the rearview mirror, out of the conscious and even subconscious mind, but weaved into the fiber of his being, the insecurities of the boy residing somewhere deep inside the man. It would make him more durable and empathetic though, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger …or cripples you.
Those are the years that shape us. The clay of our DNA material sculpted into the raw form of the individuals we will be the rest of our lives, decide the paths available to us, reveal our natural predispositions, and affect how we will live our lives, the roads we will take, and how we feel about ourselves along the way. It wasn’t fair, life isn’t. Good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, but from sad beginnings come happy endings, or so the fortune cookie said, and that was his mantra. There is no doubt truth to the saying “Children learn what they live,” and he had learned that while you can domesticate an animal, an element of the wild in the animal still remains, and in his teenage years, as the orthodontist’s braces came off, so did the psychological restraints, and as biology continued its work he would leave the cage and go on a rampage, making up for lost time and refusing to be denied what he thought to be his rightful happiness, even if it required some occasional artificial assistance.
He met a girl, fell in love, and it had all the beauty and tenderness that a first love should, and as the song goes, “ The first cut is the deepest .” But he wound up being unfaithful to her, not because she wasn’t all the things he wanted her to be, but because at that point in his life, all the pent up need for acceptance was more than he could strangle. His infidelity had unwittingly invited a stranger into the relationship, guilt. And guilt is a rude houseguest, while the young woman never expressed any knowledge of it, the secret created an invisible third party to the intimacy of their relationship that tortured him, and like an iceberg breaking apart from the glacier, he watched as she floated away, a young man’s pride and the damn guilt prohibiting him from trying to stop her. But there’s a reason they’re called first loves, and that’s because we usually have subsequent ones and this one left the watermark on his heart by which he would come to measure every other relationship he had. And while he would be aloof, he would never be unfaithful to a lover again.
He found himself to be the hedonistic pleasure-seeking monkey continually pushing the button for whatever it offered in that caveman mentality of “Pain BAD, Pleasure GOOOD,” but he had grown up in a generation that was surrounded and defined by experimentation. And in that regard he was the rule and not the exception, at an early age he began to use drugs and alcohol. For a time they appeared to be the bridge between who he was and who he wanted to be, disabling his inhibitions, but he had not grown up in an environment of moderation, but one of extremes and like many such things, they were prone to abuse, and eventually, the things that gave him some strength and courage, became his kryptonite, not a
At an age when children are perhaps their meanest, he was stuck in what seemed like a decade long game of tag, and was “it” the entire time. It is a time in our development when we are developing friendships and honing social skills, and he was emotionally relegated to standing with his nose in the corner, while others were recognizing aptitudes and abilities and defining their image of self, his image in the school picture was not the image of the cute boy it had been, and the internal disagreement between the innately confident kid, and the unattractive one in the mirror damaged him beyond his appearance and would have long lasting effects in terms of self-confidence years after these events were in the rearview mirror, out of the conscious and even subconscious mind, but weaved into the fiber of his being, the insecurities of the boy residing somewhere deep inside the man. It would make him more durable and empathetic though, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger …or cripples you.
Those are the years that shape us. The clay of our DNA material sculpted into the raw form of the individuals we will be the rest of our lives, decide the paths available to us, reveal our natural predispositions, and affect how we will live our lives, the roads we will take, and how we feel about ourselves along the way. It wasn’t fair, life isn’t. Good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, but from sad beginnings come happy endings, or so the fortune cookie said, and that was his mantra. There is no doubt truth to the saying “Children learn what they live,” and he had learned that while you can domesticate an animal, an element of the wild in the animal still remains, and in his teenage years, as the orthodontist’s braces came off, so did the psychological restraints, and as biology continued its work he would leave the cage and go on a rampage, making up for lost time and refusing to be denied what he thought to be his rightful happiness, even if it required some occasional artificial assistance.
He met a girl, fell in love, and it had all the beauty and tenderness that a first love should, and as the song goes, “ The first cut is the deepest .” But he wound up being unfaithful to her, not because she wasn’t all the things he wanted her to be, but because at that point in his life, all the pent up need for acceptance was more than he could strangle. His infidelity had unwittingly invited a stranger into the relationship, guilt. And guilt is a rude houseguest, while the young woman never expressed any knowledge of it, the secret created an invisible third party to the intimacy of their relationship that tortured him, and like an iceberg breaking apart from the glacier, he watched as she floated away, a young man’s pride and the damn guilt prohibiting him from trying to stop her. But there’s a reason they’re called first loves, and that’s because we usually have subsequent ones and this one left the watermark on his heart by which he would come to measure every other relationship he had. And while he would be aloof, he would never be unfaithful to a lover again.
He found himself to be the hedonistic pleasure-seeking monkey continually pushing the button for whatever it offered in that caveman mentality of “Pain BAD, Pleasure GOOOD,” but he had grown up in a generation that was surrounded and defined by experimentation. And in that regard he was the rule and not the exception, at an early age he began to use drugs and alcohol. For a time they appeared to be the bridge between who he was and who he wanted to be, disabling his inhibitions, but he had not grown up in an environment of moderation, but one of extremes and like many such things, they were prone to abuse, and eventually, the things that gave him some strength and courage, became his kryptonite, not a
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