Shrinking Violent...

 

This is one I was going to post before I went in. 

It's lengthy- if you want to skip the verbiage...the upshot of it is that low self opinion and feelings of unworthiness are childish, unproductive and indulgent. 

Let's all knock that shit off and get some work done. 

M'kay?




A dear friend invited me to something this week;

not just any run of the mill party or shindig…

but something important. 

It felt important; I was not certain exactly what was happening, whether I was being invited to something actual, physical or something on the internet. 

I replied in a vague kind of stammer, partly to do with my need for clarification…

But there was something else.

My nervousness came from a place of unworthiness.   

I was reminded of a time, long ago, when I reacted similarly. 

I was sitting in class in about year 10, with some other kids, and we were talking about the opposite sex, relationships and what have you. 

I said something typically self deprecating…like, ‘no girl would ever go out with me’…

& much to my surprise…one of them said SHE would go out with me.

I looked at her, shocked.  I could not believe a girl liked me, and wanted to go with me.

I stammered, ‘Me?   With you???’

With that, she turned and stormed out, saying

‘Sorry I asked!!!”

She thought I was not interested.

She thought I meant I was not interested in someone like her.

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

I liked her VERY much.

But I never cleared it up with her.

Never had the guts.

Once there is a misunderstanding…

everything is fucked.

I knew that from living in an abusive household.

Some little thing goes wrong?

EVERYTHING IS FUCKED.

Who knows; maybe this girl had a low self opinion as well. 

Maybe we were two abused kids, who almost connected.

But the violence of home life got in the way.

So…if you invite me to something…

Indeed any random act of kindness toward me…

I might not know WHAT the hell you are talking about.

If it is something for me…

A gift, a thought, a kind word or deed…

There is something inside me that cannot believe it is for me.

How could it be?

But I am working on it.

 

Funny, writing my book and turning over all these childhood memories…

It is strange to note I am STILL pretty much the same boy I was all those years ago.

So I am sorry if you are trying to do something nice for me…

Say something nice to me…

& I appear perplexed, possibly to the point of appearing to be rude.

I am not being rude…I am merely STUMPED.

I can’t really…DON’T really…believe that kindness is for me. 

In order to place who I am now into context (in order to illustrate precisely what it is I am trying to overcome) I enclose a small section from my book, which attempts to explain what life was like for me as an abused child.

The feeling of it.

I wrote this approximately 20 years ago…give or take…

& although you might argue that there is something slightly disingenuous about writing something so long after the fact

(Writing something when I was 28, about something that happened when I was 14)…  

I have had plenty (!) of time to sit with this material, & I ALSO feel I have become re-acquainted with the inner child to SUCH an extent…I truly feel the following is an accurate representation of what emotional life was like for such a child as I was.

In a noble attempt to make my world make sense to me…

I made it make sense.

It…& them.

my father made perfect sense. 

The bullies who beat me at school made perfect sense. 

The priests who thrashed & molested me made even more sense. 

Over time, everything made sense to me. 

It was all pain and heartache. 

That was it. 

That was the world. 

And all I had to do was to endure it.

After a while, I stopped struggling. 

It was not long before I realised that it was easier to give in- to take my medicine.

A human being can get used to anything. 

I assumed that was how my life was supposed to be. 

Without anything else to compare it to – neither joy nor happiness - I accepted my lot. 

In time, I came to embrace it. 

And not once did I ever think to break away from it. 

Why? 

 

I thought all children lived like this. 

I learned at a young age to walk through the world as best I could, make as few waves as possible.  The planet appeared to me to be a horrific place, but it was the only world I knew so I had better make the best of it. 

I was determined to take it, even though I could not understand it, for as long as required. 

I would try to keep my head down, and then when my time came, I would leave. 

That was it. 

It never occurred to me that in this most hellish of all fires, there was any enjoyment to be found.  I assumed life was to be endured; that you took the pain, and then you died. 

I saw the pain around me, and although I did not quite understand it-

something deep inside me told me that there was something not quite right about all this-

I supposed that this was the natural order. 

You were born, you endured pain, and you died. 

Given those ground rules, the world made perfect sense. 

The world, as far as I could make out, was nothing more than some bizarre collage of loneliness, pain and animosity. 

All around me, people did not smile at each other, or greet each other with cheerful words and happy gestures. 

They seemed to move about in this kind of nightmarish grey haze, like a German impressionist movie, looking at one another with mistrust and suspicion out of the corner of their eyes from behind the upturned collar of their jackets.

I did not understand the rules and customs of the society in which I found myself. 

Everywhere I walked the world was coloured by the same tinge. 

It was as if the entire town was part of some kind of cult, or bizarre mason outfit, and I was not welcome. 

There was something going on in that small town, and I was not party to it. 

It can’t all have been bad.  And yet the bad seemed so bad, I can scarcely remember any pleasurable moments. 

I do remember quiet sunny mornings in the back yard, smelling the lawn after the grass had been cut when there was no one home. 

I remember climbing tall trees in the pine forest to escape for a few hours. 

I was never afraid of falling- not because of youthful abandon, but because I did not care what happened to me. 

Embroiled in the pain of home life, I had nothing to look forward to. 

In an ironic attempt to force me to socialize- like applying sunscreen to third degree burns- my parents packed me off to the boy scouts. 

To other boys, the scouts promised fun, adventure and bonding. 

To me, it was a pseudo paramilitary nightmare, a slow torture, the endless barrage of bush skills and the constant lashing together of wooden things like some kind of drug-induced assembly line. 

The object of the game seemed to be to win as many badges for as many useless skills as possible. 

There were badges for lighting fires armed with nothing but a twig; trying to find North; looking for food in the bush; identifying dangerous wildlife; and lashing together occasional furniture with sticks and twine. 

The boy scouts called these strange activities ‘survival skills’. 

The only survival tips I needed were ones like ‘how to survive a thrashing’ and ‘How to survive abuse and degradation’. 

I had already identified the ‘dangerous wildlife’. 

They were other members of the human race. 

I wondered how on earth you were supposed to avoid them, when they were everywhere around you.  Everywhere you went, whether you liked it or not- another human being to come and fuck up your day. 

The boy-scout organization wanted to help us to understand the environment around us, and how to survive in it. 

All I wanted was to understand why my father hit my mother, why he hit us boys, and why we tried to tear each other’s throats out. 

I would have given anything to learn why the priests, men of God, beat the living daylights out of me. 

And what the Hell I was supposed to do about it. 

The idea of lashing together three sticks with a big ball of twine did not help me, and made no sense, when there were other matters of more pressing urgency to understand. 

But I had no idea how one expressed these concerns. 

So until an idea came to me, I lashed the damned sticks together. 

No amount of trying did any good. 

I failed at even the most basic of tasks. 

I was so inept I could not even take those three sticks, bind them in the middle with twine and make them stand up. 

Just as I felt I had them standing upright and secure, the twine would come loose, and the whole damned thing would collapse. 

I could not keep it together; that was one of the first thing I learned about myself. 

But I certainly tried…

Suffice it to say, I did not get my badge.

For lashing sticks, starting fires, finding north or understanding my life. 

None of these activities meant anything to a young kid who could not even understand the small town around him, let alone life in the wilderness. 

I had my own wilderness. 

If I could not fathom a small country town, a claustrophobic prison farm peopled with bizarre nightmarish circus freaks, and then I failed to understand what chance I stood in the wild.  I already lived in the wildest world imaginable, and I hadn’t the slightest ideas how one was supposed to survive. 

I failed to see how starting fires by rubbing two sticks together could possibly help me any further. 

Who I was, was never good enough, and I failed at everything I tried; and the more I failed, the more I was beaten and terrorised by my beloved Father. 

I tried to paste a life together as best I could.

 

I am STILL, after all this time…

Trying to paste it all together.

 

I hope you understand, if you are kind to me, why it seems like a foreign language.