March 15th, 2004
“I mean, say I'm in a relationship and something’s wrong, I don’t know what’s wrong ... and then you throw your cheap rhymes at me!”
-My friend Ken, in a cruelly-accurate assessment of the lyrics to one of my songs.
It's amazing how real, palpable physical life-lessons return in later years as conceptual or social life-lessons. In effect, the second time around, these lessons point out that they are different manifestations (or instantiations) of the same phenomenon. I've always believed in what I call the Cosmic Books, and I've always believed that those books, like a accountant's ledger, should balance.
I remember hugging my mother as a young teenager, giving her the same kind of enthusiastic bear-hug that I gave her as a child. But I nearly hugged the stuffing out of her; I was six feet tall by age 13, and I could have easily incurred some serious bodily harm on her with my hug.
Add to that my inexplicable (to me) curse for a few years of breaking everything. Open a door, off the hinges it came. Sit in a chair, feel it flatten under me (sometimes painfully!) Have a shower in the morning, pull the handle off the tap. And while eating a loaf of toast for breakfast, I'd break a plate, the knife I used to spread the butter ... the table, etc.
In short, I didn't know my own strength. It's easy for that to happen to teenagers, boys mostly, but girls too. I spontaneously grew muscles and bulk, and I could break and hurt without realizing what I was doing. Why, I even "nudged" Peter Lefebvre from up the street out of the way once during a hockey game and he had to be carried off the ice.
Well, I learned, and eventually stopped breaking things and people, and even became a little graceful in my daily body language--including an effeminate little wrist-stretching thing I do to avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. So the books closed on that life-lesson since I'd learned it and assimilated it into my being.
OK, so let's fast-forward to my 30s. The lesson I learned more than 1/2 my lifetime ago has come back, but in a social context. Put simply, I am much stronger and potentially intimidating ... capable of being much more damaging to peoples' feelings than I was aware. This came out especially loud when people close to me would repeat "incidents" where they said, "you scared that poor person" or "that really intimidated me." At first I couldn't understand, and then I started to watch other people who said and did things the same way I did. I was shocked to play back my own actions and statements (and body language) and realize just how big and strong I can be with people ... people with whom I was uncomfortable and intimidated.
Like, take the other day when I took someone to a workout club to help them sign up. I walked in and saw all those people stretching and stepping and whirring and clomping, sweating and losing weight (ahem) and I was, plainly, intimidated and bothered. Well, I thought I was being restrained and distant with the people working there while I waited for someone to sign forms and get her picture taken. But afterwards, she said that the people in there were intimidated by me. I derived no satisfaction from that; in fact, I was surprised and a little shocked.
In short, I didn't know my own strength. And just as it's easy for that to happen to teenagers in a physical sense, it's just as easy for that to happen to adults in the social/interpersonal sense. Hopefully, just as teenagers grow out of it, adults can mature out of it as well. The other parallel is that it is more common in men, but women aren't always so sharp either.
I'm left wondering how this is going to manifest itself in my 40s ... or will I be forced to discover another pattern within the pattern?
Note: If there are people who read my stories and these rants, they might feel ripped off by the fact that this rant was cribbed to form a conversation in my most recent story. Well ... sorry about that. At least you can get an insight into how my stories are written if you study both carefully.