I can clearly remember the first day I felt a complete loss of my truth in form. It was Summer, 1990. I had just “graduated” fifth grade, and I found myself at the local swimming pool, grabbing some sun with three of the prettiest girls in school, whom we’ll call Annie, Bernice, and Kathy.
As we sat by the water, in a little circle with our pool chairs, listening to the likes of Amy Grant’s “Baby, Baby” and New Kids on the Block, Bernice and the others started talking about “girl stuff”: makeup, clothes, and…boys. Stuff that I had no interest in talking about — and the boys they were talking about being interested in were not…well, not ME.
I couldn’t understand it, what was I doing wrong? I had befriended the prettiest girls in school, I had joined them to socialize at the swimming pool, I had engaged them in conversation about themselves, why wasn’t my “Dale Carnegie” strategy (I had read his book that year) working?
Well, this isn’t the reason, but maybe the outer reflection: I was fat. Well, chubby is a better description, but the kids don’t say, “Chubby,” they say, “Fat.” I had been gaining weight since the second grade and my negative self-concept was growing in size and scope, and my outer body reflected it. As I realized that the girls I pined after saw me as only a friend, I was, for the first time, admittedly unhappy. Up until this day, I had sort of danced around the issue, saying to myself, “Just wait, this summer at the pool, you’ll get a girlfriend…just wait…” lol
Anyway, as I sat there turning brown, I had hit rock bottom. I was overweight, I had a poor relationship with my parents, and I didn’t feel I had any friends who really “got me”. I was 10 YEARS OLD! How could I have fallen this far, so fast?
We’ll have to take it back a few years to second grade. I had been the love of my first grade teacher’s life: she still to this day talks about how when we drew our self-portraits of our faces, she told us to “cut it out with scissors, put your name on it, and turn it in.” Most students put their name on the back, or just scribbled it onto their drawing itself. I never even considered either of those options and just cut out a little bubble of paper above my head that was blank, and wrote, “Sean”. This type of thinking was exemplary of the kid I was, I just did what came to my mind and didn’t question it.
Well, second grade was my rude awakening into the “real world”. The teacher there was hard as nails, and considered me insubordinate, overly talkative, and disrespectful to her and her assignments. I can remember one of her “tests” was called the “dandelion test”: she clipped four pressed, mangled, laminated remnants of flowers onto the chalkboard, and our assigment was to write “1-4: Dandelion? Yes or No.” I got two right, and received my first “F”. This was accelerated education? I was appalled. Where was the creativity that I had experienced from my teachers in previous years? I voiced my displeasure by making wisecracks in the back of class about anything and everything.
Now, looking back, I imagine I probably didn’t make that woman’s life very easy, but you have to remember, I was seven years old and she was the adult. And she decided to press my buttons, too, by making me take a “behavioral report card” home every Friday that my mom had to sign and I was to bring it back on Monday. Lots of tears were shed on Friday nights — and at home, I was getting no sympathy. My parents wanted a “good boy,” and I don’t blame them — but my point to them was clear: “why can’t you consider the fact that maybe this teacher doesn’t have my best interest in mind? why is it that I am 100% wrong in this situation…why can’t you just back me up, like other parents do for their kids, and tell this teacher to go shove it?”
True, I may have been inundated with fairy tales of parents who went “down to that damn school, to tell that damn teacher she can go to hell!” kind of like what Jimmy Stewart does on the phone to Zuzu’s teacher in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I wanted parents who thought I was a good boy without having to prove I was a good boy. That following spring was the final straw.
My family and I were all set to go to a Chicago Sting soccer game. I was a huge soccer buff–I was struggling to decide among being a professional actor, a soccer player, or an astronaut when I gew. The week before the game I broke something in the house and lied about it, I can’t remember the exact details, but the parental punishment was handed down: NO CHICAGO STING SOCCER GAME. My sister was then invited to take her best friend in my place. I was incensed. ”Any other punishment but that! This is the thing I have looked forward to most in my LIFE! Please!” They wouldn’t hear of it and, sure enough that night they went without me.
Well, life changed for the worse in our house that next morning. Prior to that day, I was a 6 A.M. riser, joining my dad for breakfast, reading the paper, and then watching the Muppet Show. The next day I woke up much later, and I never again felt comfortable around my parents. They had betrayed me time and time again in my eyes, and they weren’t to be trusted.
Now, maybe you’re saying, surely you’ve let that go by now, Sean, surely someone as spiritual as you can forgive his parents for a series of mistakes they made over 20 years ago — and it’s not like you were just a perfect little angel. And I would tell you, sure, I love my parents, and I don’t hate them like I did that year — but to be honest, I just gave them the silent treatment for basically the next ten years until I left for California at age 18. And I think they probably just thought, “That’s how he is. I guess we’re not cool enough to talk to.” Or whatever parents think when their kid doesn’t communicate with them. I had formed it in my head, “these people don’t really care about me — they just want to condition me to be how they want me to be, and I do not accept that.”
So, my defense mechanism was silence. However, that silence was challenged every night at the dinner table. Like a good family, we ate dinner together every night, and my sister and I were faced with a barrage of questions — but we were not allowed to talk with our mouth full. So to avoid having to speak, I would EAT THE ENTIRE TIME, barely coming up from my plate to breathe. Hence, by age 10, I was pretty chubby.
So here I was, 10, chubby, lonely, and unhappy. Maybe victims of other hardships will find this story silly, and perhaps rightly so, but to me it was real, all the more cementing my belief that our minds are the makers of experience. To me, this feeling made me wish I was dead. We’ve all had that feeling, and what caused those feeling on a situational level are less important than the fact that we feel that way.
So back at the swimming pool, I made a vow to myself: that I would find a way to get thin. That I would find a way to be liked and make friends, that I would find a way to be happy.
That day, I began to wake up. 10 years lulled to sleep by the world’s conditioning, and the rest of my life devoted to waking. If that is the price I had to pay for the joy I feel today, I accept it. I now know the reasons for my (and all) childhood suffering: “all the worlds a stage” — it’s the story of EVERY HUMAN LIFE. We have collectively chosen this world of “LIFE-DEATH-LIFE” as our reality, and therefore we all have a story similar to mine, only the specifics change. Waking up is unavoidable. It’s just a matter of motivation.
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