Not Knowing Any Better

I’ve been remembering childhood lately – thinking about when I didn’t know any better, and what that was like.  Not knowing Butler Hill was way too

dangerous to roller skate down; having no reason to yet fear the dark; not knowing that I couldn’t adapt Gone with the Wind to a play and perform it with my friends; not knowing I couldn’t just write a book and send it off to a publisher found in the Yellow Pages; and sensing, but not yet knowing, something just wasn’t quite right, that there was resentment, dislike.  Not knowing - the wonderful innocence, naivety and fearlessness, before “experience” in the guise of doubt, fear, protection and survival, takes over. 

A child learns this fear soon enough.

The reason why you can’t do something usually pops right up first when faced with something new.  “I can’t” forms a shield, a protective bubble in which we live, that we form around ourselves layer after layer for protection against the brutality of a random universe, the unknown.  We can’t just go from having an

idea, to acting on that idea as we did when we were young.  It’s called maturity, growing up, living in the “real world.”  We weigh the consequences; don’t behave rashly, impulsively, on a whim.  All bad connotations.  But – really?  Must everything in life truly be vetted before we can move at all?  Hasn’t that protective part of our brain taken over just a bit too much? 

I have wanted to write a book all of my life, ever since I can remember.  Just like a childhood hero, Harriet the Spy, I would keep a notebook and

faithfully chronicle my life, all the events and adventures that were sure to come, and all the profoundly deep thoughts I uniquely had that nobody else had ever thought.  It was the secret I held on to, cherished – it was my lifeline, how I knew I would be able to one day transcend and it was certainly my escape.  I guarded that secret, turned to it when things were awful, when I didn’t fit, when I was so bad but didn’t know why, when all I could do was run away to my secret hiding spot deep in my closet in a nest of cushions and blankets, and take out this precious secret in a clandestine rendezvous of magical planning.

One evening in the desert twilight, encouraged by a rare moment of closeness, I dared.  I didn’t yet know any better you see.  I confessed my secret.  I heard all the fanfare behind me as we sat on the curb, all the flourish which that momentous moment, that declaration, demanded – this was it.  I closed my eyes and revealed my secret soul. 

“Everybody wants to do that.”  And I was left on the curb, in the dark, utterly alone. 

Somehow I rebounded from that, found a desperate loophole.  Ok, if it weren’t my life story, if it were fiction, maybe that is “allowed.”  So I did it, I wrote a book.  I enlisted the girl next door as illustrator and it was brilliant.  It was the achievement of my young lifetime.  I didn’t tell anybody this time, but it was exposed and I abruptly discovered “reality” once again, that I “can’t do that.”  No one would ever read “that” – that amateurish, pathetic, embarrassing manuscript, stuffed in an envelope addressed in scrawling crayon.  In fact, “they” would likely throw it across the room once they saw it – or did it get thrown across the room then?  I don’t recall.  That was my moment of loss of innocence and the beginning of dissociation as I struggled to reconcile the impossible world in which I existed.  I have no recollection from that slap of a moment in time, what happened next.  I don’t know whatever became of that child’s manuscript of which she had been

so very proud, that was such a monumental step into what should have been her life, her path. 

I’ve been so angry for so long at that little girl, that she wasn’t stronger.  I fiercely resent the weakness, that she lost me my dream life, that I have to live every day with the very pathetic knowledge that such a seemingly minor thing so violently impacted her, froze her in veritable stasis for the next 30 years.  That I am still picking my way out of that prison, embarrassed to acknowledge such a petty thing won so easily, that I had no resources, no

foundation upon which to cling and stay standing up.  I want to shake that child by her slumped little shoulders and tell her to stand up, to say “no,” to keep

going, to mail that package that was pure love, find somebody who would support the gut instinct, to not give up, to not be so utterly crushed that she is trying to emerge out from under it all still.

It’s time; time to grow up, to know better.  

So I took a stand, and a million deep breaths, and ‘outed’ myself to some from my past.  I claimed aloud the title of
‘writer’, declared publicly that I am writing.  After the various  automatic responses – what they gave up when young, what they could have been, how they could have been a writer, an actor, happy, if not for so many things, like me for instance – there was just a glimmer of recognition, recollection, a flash of awareness.  Of what happened to me, of the impact the past has had, of what I was accusing now?  Or maybe it was my imagination, what I needed to see.  I faced my past in the only way I can at this point, with the fervent hope that exposing it to the light of day, acknowledging it at least, will allow me once and for all to escape its rusty, embarrassing chains, and continue on the path started so very long ago. 

It’s all I can do.