Bullies
My daughter Madeleine starts 4th grade in less than a week. Among all the things this does to me, it reminds me of certain things she said last year, in 3rd grade, regarding bullies.
There were several instances, you see, where some little girl or boy would be rude to her or to her friends. They’d say rude things (though no swearing - not yet!), they’d cut in line, they’d take the last of something and dare somebody to say something. Yeah - little snotty shitlickers exist even in 3rd grade, even now. TV ads, morality tales, movies where kindness is rewarded - years of these attempts at indoctrinating children to be gentle, generous, thoughtful, and altruistic have still ultimately failed on a portion of our population. I blame the parents, who were probably snotty little shitlickers when THEY were in 3rd grade.
The thing that got me was that Madeleine called them BULLIES.
I’m gonna have to disagree with her there, and someday, when she’s older and she’s allowed to read this, I’ll tell her about MY childhood bullies. I’ll regale her with stories of violence and cruelty that will make her understand that those snotty brats who cut in line are nothing. Hell, I’ve recently been called a bully a couple of times, both times by people who didn’t like certain aggressive moves I made playing games, or didn’t like the aggressive language I sometimes use to make my often valid points.
The main difference, I think, between my bullies and hers (and me) is motive. I have a distinct and understandable motive for what I do and what I say. Those kids at her school have motives that, while selfish, are also understandable.
My bullies were nothing short of mean. Period. They had a psychosis that made them do things no reasonable person would do, and they were unpredictable, cruel, and predatory. They looked for kids to beat the shit out of - and any kid would do, not just the nerdy ones. I saw one slap his grandmother when she asked him to sit down. One got suspended several times a month for randomly wailing on some kid in P.E., even kids who’d give him as good of a beating as he gave.
These bullies were young; if they were teenagers, they were barely so. And this was the age before guns became a genuine factor. I can’t imagine the mayhem they would have caused if these fuckers had access to handguns.
At the time of this writing, all of MY bullies - with one notable exception that I’d talk to you about privately should you ask - are either dead or in jail. That’s how fucked up they were.
And one prayer that I send up nightly is that Madeleine only ever knows HER version of a bully, and that she never meets anyone like the ones I knew.
The Logical vs. The Visceral
When I was a kid, I was clumsy. As a result, I wasn’t especially good at sports. I was awkward with girls, and a prime target for bullies. What’s more, I was poor white trash with a drunk for a mom and a failed pig farmer for a dad.
But I was smart, and I lived on the edge of 400 acres of thick forest that no one except me and my brothers and our equally awkward friends ever set foot on. I developed an intricate and elaborate emotional and spiritual life, based in large part on exercising my vivid imagination, and based in large part on exploring those woods. When I got a little older, I began going to church, and I started a relationship with God, who - because I was so in touch with my spirituality - wasn’t silent or invisible, as he’s so often accused of being. Instead, he was omnipresent and very, very real. I could feel him coursing through my arteries and veins.
I became a master of the visceral, exceedingly comfortable in that spiritual and emotional world. I was romantic. I was full of conviction, and I wasn’t afraid to show my emotions - even to cry. And despite my awkwardness and the circumstances of my upbringing, I was happy.
I stayed that way for years. I’m pretty sure I was still a romantic when I met my wife. You can ask a lot of my college friends and former college friends - I was often fiery with conviction (which is why some of those people are FORMER friends now).
But then - and I don’t know when exactly - something started to shift. At some point, I became more comfortable in my own skin. At some point, the circumstances of my childhood dissolved into mere memories, replaced by my much more materialistically satisfying adulthood. My imagination became less of a place to inhabit and more of a tool to use to get what I wanted.
God became quiet, obfuscated. I started thinking that romantic notions were silly and hokey and contrived. I found it harder to cry.
Now, that visceral world I was so comfortable in has become a much more physical and logical world. I don’t follow convictions because I’m emotionally charged by them - I follow them because they just make sense. The existence of God still makes sense to me, but I’ve come to realize that He/She/It is a lot more complicated than my former visceral self could have guessed.
I’m no longer comfortable in a visceral world, and when I touch the visceral, I feel out of my element. In other words, when a movie or book or song moves me emotionally, when someone expresses a certain level of sentimentality, when I go to church - I feel discomfited. Bothered. Awkward.
Here’s the thing, though: if you’re reading this and thinking that I’m telling you all this because I’m no longer happy, then I’ve misled you and I need to make my point better. I am happy - happier than I ever have been.
Those emotional highs and lows are volatile and ephemeral. They come, they hit me hard, they make my heart race and my eyes fill with tears. but then they go away, and often leave me wondering if they were genuine. Or necessary.
The cool logic that I feel comfortable with now never goes away. It’s constant, reassuring, and reliable.
I think.
There are two questions I ask now, whenever a quiet moment overtakes me:
Why did I change? And which state of mind - the visceral or the logical - is healthier for me?