Well I used to be a good boy, but that’s a long time ago
If it was ever good for anything it’s in the stories I have told
————————————————————
Indeed, This process of looking back and writing these stories about being a good boy is good for a whole lot. Perhaps everything. They bring up what used to be too painful and/or shameful for me to look at before. And with this close self examination I can now allow myself to admit that I really wasn’t responsible for what others were doing… to me or to those I saw them doing it to. That my failure to do anything to stop it, did not make me culpable.
I used to think there was a defect in me. That, because I had been unable to bring myself to do something about the cruelty and violence I saw and experienced… somewhere inside, I must have thought it was normal, or that they/I deserved the abuse or worse, that I was responsible for it and even may have wanted it… enjoyed it.
At the very least I thought I should just be glad it wasn’t happening to me. When it wasn’t happening to me. Rationalizations and excuses. I would beat myself senseless, or tell myself that it wasn’t all that bad.
That last one was the easiest. Once my soon-to-be-adult self started becoming aware of how tame my experience was relative to that of others, it was very easy to believe I was never the victim of abuse at all. I mean… look how good I’d had it. I had wonderful, modern and forward-thinking parents and a wonderful, healthy environment to grow up in. And even if I was abused a bit, even if I saw cruelty and violence, it was NOTHING! compared to what kids growing up in places like Hell’s Kitchen, Compton or Birmingham had to endure. Never mind all the kids in other countries. Man! What a whiner I was to think I had any right to see myself as any kind of victim.
But my adult, aware self now tells me something else. Something that rings far truer than anything I’d ever told myself before.
My adult self tells me that I really was a good boy who never intentionally hurt others. I am now a good man and I deserve to be happy. Every day I find my happiness from knowing this and in doing all I can to help others however I can.
Yes!
Most importantly, I now see that the abuse I was experiencing at home, from my older brother Bruce, had a lot to do with why I saw myself as partly responsible for the abuse I saw others commit (in boy scouts, on the bus, in homeroom at school etc… ) and why I didn’t try and stop it. To be a hero like Keith. And then, when I saw some of the terrible things Keith did… how could I think it was ever possible to be safe from this shit?
For the longest time, I felt like I was in some kind of cruel paradox. That despite my constant rebelliousness, my insistence to always do things my own way… I was simultaneously controlled by the will of others. By my perception of how they saw me. Leaving me unable to have any real affect my own life and become who I really was. The person I had been all along.
Telling that story will require my adult self to go back a little bit before the move to the Minnesota countryside, before the hellish bus rides and before the brand new and modern John Adams Jr. High School and it’s rebel chaos.
Back to the time of my dirt clod covered, cul-de-sac world of fake, childish war and real violence. Back when I first started seeing myself in a way that I really never was.
