February 10, 2005

"The Non-Existent Childhood"

I wonder what it was like to be a child. I remember some memories when I would play with toys with my brother, the only person within the same age range who was allowed to be near me. I wonder what it was like if I got to go with friends to a party or sleep over at another person's house, watching movies all night. That could've been fun.

What could've also been fun would've been being able to watch those Saturday morning cartoons like everyone else. I dream of a time when "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" weren't a sign of the devil and "The Simpsons" wasn't regarded as a source for bad vocabulary such as "cool, dude" and "don't have a cow." I see those shows now with 20 year-old eyes that can't help but to analyze POV perspective and the overall symbolism of the great adventure. I don't want to think about those things for once. Maybe, just sheer enjoyment is the best way for me to return to the simplicity of mere visual aesthetic without the reasoning behind it.

I feel I had to grow up faster than I wanted to. I didn't know it at the time, but I was being setup for the role of the adult long before I could handle it. So it was perceived that I would benefit better if I didn't deal with the "piddly" things of being a child. I don't know about now, but I'm wasting much too time getting it back. The hard part is that I haven't really experienced it, so I don't really know what I'm looking for.

It sucks to be the person on the outside looking in. I don't wish it on anybody, but I guess I get to be the special one that has the opportunity to be denied of this. I wish I could blame someone. I wonder if I can really blame someone. I wonder if my life would've been more fulfilling if I had the chance to be human from the start, instead of trying to attain it at the end of my 11th grade year. It's a horrible feeling to know that you're missing something, don't know what it is, and nobody can tell you what it is but rather deny that you're perfectly fine and that you really didn't need what you lost anyway. Right. I wouldn't be on this mission to make up for it if it obviously wasn't important in the first place.

This particular dearth in my individual being is an obvious recognition of the involuntary disparities in my upbringing. I was always put in the position of "you can do this if you want to do it," only to find out that my "want" is defeated by adult reasoning. My parents were the great surveyors of the land with those really long telescopes that could see miles and miles away and forget about the here and now. There are times when we think about the future so much and wish for it to be great that we forget that we forgot to build the bridges and foundations that will get us to our idealized point. What I'm trying to say here is: good ideals, really bad way to go about it.

Parenting is paranoia. These children of sorts come into their lives and they give up everything they own to make sure that they prosper. What they forget, though, is that the ideal is getting in the way of the true humanity of the child. We are raised to be performers, wind-up monkeys if you will, to the rest of the world. Everything must be organized. It all has to have a means to an end, and when we're old enough, a means to a paycheck. Point A to Point B. I have forced myself, over my time away in college, to sneak around those two points and sightsee in between. I can't tell you about the journey; it's extremely wasteful. But, it was important, but you're not going to know that. All you're going to know is that, it fit the overall design and that's about it.

I wonder what it's like to make mistakes without having to hypothesize on paper. Maybe there is another way to come to the conclusions that I discuss right now. This is a poor compensation for the half of my life that I'm trying to find. I have made it my mission to pick up the pieces, or rather, create new pieces to fill in the old holes. This struggle, to say the least, is the attempt to finally come to terms with what has been given to me and work toward my own dreams - undistorted and uninfluenced by others. I want my dreams to be unaffected by the misjudged past.

It is true that you don't know what you've got until it's gone. And when it's gone, you put your heart and your soul into trying to get it all back again. My first task, then, would have to be to recreate the environment and then live it.