
Now that I’m a father of teenagers – and one who took several variously steep and winding paths to get here – I’m quite shocked at how simple the important stuff has become.
I see both son and daughter struggling to assert their identities, and how much of this is made in the reflections of immature role-models and a society that continues to be relentlessly exploitative. And the main thing that strikes me is the flimsy and shallow nature of the ‘character’ they are being forced to adopt to gain such approval.
Admittedly I came to this conclusion via the fire escape, and not the main lobby. I learned through mistakes – and there are days when I walk across the beach of my memory and find, washed up in the shore, THOUSANDS of TERRIBLE moments – each one a shameful epiphany, witnessed by others and preserved in eternity, and toxic enough in recollection to make me twitch and swear and want to hide in a hole in the ground.
There are people whose sole memory of me will be of someone angry, or pathetic, someone weak or cruel, cunning or stupid, a villain, a victim, an embarrassing lunatic – none of which – and ALL of which – are me.
But from here, where I am right now, I’m really rather bewildered I took it all so seriously. Not the passion, the instinct to impulsively snatch life from the fire and crack it open for the marrow – that I get, that I will not and cannot regret. It’s more what came after; the sense of Judgement.
Judgement, as word and concept, has been hopped up beyond its real value. All the stone tablet thing about not killing anyone or wanting to fuck your neighbours spouse – I get why people put on the robes and get all serious and political about that. But when you’re young, the only politics that really matter are the politics of the people who don’t want you competing for THEIR resources.
You get two choices here: you either fight for your right to compete, or you align yourself with the haves in the hope they’ll share. Both require judging yourself according to the rules of the group you think you want to belong to, be they the dominant hierarchy, the people you want to like you, or the family you love – all of which are defined by different roles. And , as these roles start to inevitably conflict with each other, you’ll become aware how necessary it is that you learn how to start stepping into, and out of, different – and often conflicting – personas.
And thats what you’ll do. And if you are bold and driven in any kind of way, you’ll find yourself in situations where you act like – or even BECOME – people who you may not recognise. And yet you will see recognition in the eyes of all the witnesses around you, because those people will be JUDGING you.
And it may go badly. They may judge that you were never, or are no longer, worthy of their respect – and that is simply the end of it. You may tell yourself that the people who just rejected you are unworthy themselves and can fuck right off, and then go away and find other people more suited to your style – only to find that they reject you as well, for different but equally good reasons.
And you will go on collecting such judgements, which, viewed in their entirety, will refine and pinpoint your faults to the point where there’s no longer anything positive left to be. And then, all you have is your memories, the memories of you and the people you knew, and what you did and what they did and where it was and what happened and why – although it has to be said, the why of it usually won’t make any kind of sense.
But it’s all frozen in the flotsam of those moments, turning uselessly in the waves and being rolled up and down the shore in the wash.
And it’s then that it all starts to make sense.
Because all there is left for you is to stand on the shore and lift your eyes to the sunset on the horizon, and inhale the sharp salt breeze, and GLORY in the people who made it this far alongside you – in YOUR journey, in YOUR heart, in those moments, now, you share with the living, and those moments past you have shared with the dead.
And, when you get it – then everything seems gloriously silly, and even buying a pint of milk is an adventure worth undertaking, a personal challenge to try and inject a little more kindness into the world.
And at that point, when that inner defiance, that inner conviction to be who you REALLY want to be, starts rising within you, you’ll look down on the shore, and you’ll see the surf gliding like quicksilver over a beach of clean white sand.
And you’ll notice that it's shimmering in the starlight.
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