The Turning Point

I don't know where it started. I was initially a happy, well-adjusted kid. I can think of a few times when I had surprise injuries that made me realize the world wasn't the bright, beautiful, safe place I saw on "Sesame Street."

In one of the incidents, I was at a friend's house and I had just learned how to use the swings by myself. I was so excited! I swung higher and higher, wondering if I'd go all the way around in a loop. I proclaimed "I'm king of the swing!" and shortly after, fell off, landing flat on my back. There wasn't any pain at first, but it had knocked the wind out of me, so I couldn't breathe, which terrified me. Finally, I could move, and breathe, and the pain set in and I screamed so loud my mom could hear me from inside the house, several houses down. I ran home and she said my back was "like one big bruise." I slept the rest of the afternoon, and eventually used the swings again, but I was wary.

Another time, I was riding my Big Wheel around the block, collecting clover flowers and dandelions to bring back for my mom. In one patch of clover, I saw a bee and it wasn't moving. I picked it up to see if it was okay and it stung me in the thumb. Feeling shocked and betrayed, with my thumb burning like fire, I ran home screaming again, learning that despite what we're shown in "Snow White" and other Disney films, animals aren't necessarily our friends.

Then one summer, I went outside to join another group of kids who were playing a few houses down. We all had connected backyards, so I just walked out through our patio door barefoot and walked across the grass. I wasn't looking where I was going, and stepped right in a pricker plant, ending up with tiny thorns all over my foot. I ended up mostly hopping home on my good foot, and my mom spent at least a half hour pulling them out of my foot with a tweezers.

That may have been the time that did it. After that, I saw thorns and slivers everywhere. I was afraid to walk outside in sandals, much less barefoot.

In general, our neighborhood was safe and I could hang out with any of the kids, and even the adults were fun and friendly. Except for the house next door. Two older boys lived there with their mother, who suffered from migraines. In true 1970s fashion, she would send them out of the house in the morning and tell them not to come inside until dinner, so they didn't make her headaches worse. The boys were the first bullies I ever knew, and the other kids in the neighborhood knew to avoid them.

I learned that lesson one day when I dared to ride my Big Wheel past their house. One of the boys saw me, walked up, and told me not to ride in front of his house. I had been having a perfectly happy day, wearing my super cool Captain America shirt, living the little kid life, when he yanked me off of my Big Wheel, kicked it over, then dragged me onto his lawn, where he punched me in the stomach, then flipped me over and tore grass from the lawn to stuff up the back of my shirt. It scratched and itched and I could feel it everywhere even hours after I took a bath.

That of course seems weird. I got beat up plenty of times over the years after that, in other places by other kids, but who stuffs grass up someone's shirt? It was unpleasant, but where does that idea come from?

After that, I never rode my Big Wheel on that side of the block again. As far as I was concerned, the neighborhood ended at one edge of my yard. I never even looked over there, except in dread, making sure the kids weren't coming to get me.

I think that's where fear started to become a part of my life, where I started changing my worldview and habits to accommodate perceived threats. This continued a few years later, when my family moved.

Kids were different in this new town. On my very first day of school, one of the older kids picked on me at the bus stop, convincing me that my mom had accidentally burned down a neighbor's yard with a cigarette and the police were going to come arrest her that day. There happened to be a cigarette butt in the gutter there, and the yard had dirt, but no grass (in reality, they were waiting to have sod put down). This sounds stupid, but I was 5.

By the time I got to school, I was hysterical, trying to protect my mom. I had never been picked on before. Beaten up once, but never picked on. After that, it would happen pretty much daily. Suddenly there were threats everywhere.

A lack of trust

The doctor's office was another good one. Exams were no big deal, but medicine and shots were two things I dreaded. I fought like hell against shots, and the older I got, the harder I was to restrain. At one point it took three nurses to hold me down. My pediatrician was an old Army doctor, and he just prescribed the shots, he didn't give them. He came in one time, laughing, and kissed me on the head, saying, "He's quite a fighter."

The nurses weren't as amused. One year, I was due to have a TB test. I didn't know what that was. The nurse said, "Oh don't worry, it's fun. I'll be right back." I was sitting on the exam table with my arms in my lap, wearing a t-shirt. The room door was open a crack.

Suddenly the nurse rushed back in. Before I knew what was going on, she jabbed her thumb into my forearm, just below my elbow.

I yelped and she said, "HA! Gotcha!"

I looked down and there was a circle of little dots where she had jabbed me. Some had little pinpricks of blood.

She looked at my mom with a look of satisfaction. "All done!"

Already I knew adults lied all the time. They lied to each other, they lied to kids. They lied to get us to do things, they so we wouldn't do things, they lied because they didn't want to tell us things. There were a few adults I trusted, but overall, as much as I wanted to trust them, I thought they were lying, manipulative sacks of shit, which made the world very dangerous indeed.

Not only was there danger around every corner, from bugs getting into things, birds shitting on things, and even my dog eating my toys and books, but there was a general lack of truth and trustworthiness aside from what I read in books and heard from a few key adults.

Over time, this resulted in me trusting less and fearing more. I wanted to be safe, but almost never felt safe. Not at school, not at home, not outside. The only place I could relax was my grandparents' house, and they lived 100 miles away.

The Omen

One of the things that really bothered me was the film, "The Omen." From my earliest days I loved movies and comic books. Spider-Man, "Star Trek", "The Twilight Zone", and all the classic horror films like "Dracula", "Frankenstein," "The Mummy", and "The Wolf Man."

In my mind I knew that these things were all pretend. But I also knew that the classic horror movies were based on legends, and legends were based on reality. And science fiction was literally fiction based on science. Science extrapolated to an extreme, or not so extreme, possibility. That's what makes the stories fun. Today there are rockets, and space stations, and cel phones, things that decades ago were fantasy.

A common thread of the old horror movies were the rules. Each monster had limitations and weaknesses, a trait shared by comic book heroes and villains. Fire, a silver bullet, a stake through the heart. Something always could end the monster's threat. Plus, most of the time, there was one monster, which typically moved slowly. Even with "The Blob", which grew to enormous size as it consumed more victims, you could escape it by going in a walk-in freezer. There were limitations.

That was true until I saw "The Omen." In that film, there were multiple threats. One was the Anti-Christ himself. Another was his followers. You never knew who they were, they could be anyone, anywhere, always ready to kill for him. Another was his animal servants, often a dog, but ravens and crows also did his bidding. And then there was his actual father, Satan. Never seen in the film, Satan was the most terrifying, acting invisibly in the form of freak accidents. Think of the "Final Destination" films and you'll know what I mean.

All those combined embodied the paranoid reality of threats everywhere. The scene that resonated with me most was when a priest, played by former "Dr. Who" actor Patrick Troughton, knows he's marked for death because he has warned of the reality of the Anti-Christ on Earth. He flees for the safety of a church, and just before he can cross onto the sacred ground, a bolt of lighting strikes the spire of the church, detaching it. It falls like a spear, impaling the priest, running him through and impaling him on the spot. It was a clear day, and no storm came. Just one bolt of lighting.

I knew from school that lighting can strike anywhere. It was just on the news a few weeks ago. A girl in California was standing in her yard on a clear day when lighting hit just behind her. It also happened in Florida last week. While there was a storm 22 miles away, a bolt of lighting hit the water near some swimmers and a man immediately went into cardiac arrest.

These things happen. And the more I learned in school, the more afraid I was. Soon I realized, there was no safe place, anywhere.

The Prisoner

Intelligent animals have more stress when they feel they have little or no control. I often equate the kid world I knew with prison. You go to school, where you have no control at all. You're told where to go and what to do the entire time you're there, and expected to be quiet unless addressed, and you're expected to say only the information you're asked for. In your recreation time, there's a good chance you'll be assaulted unless you have fighting skills or a protective group around you.

At home, depending on how your parents are, your life may again be speak if spoken to. Or, the W.C. Fields quote I was often told, "Children should be seen and not heard." Sure, we had cartoons, but there's TV, hot meals, and books in prison, too. A kid can complain, but it's likely to get nowhere, and may result in mockery or worse treatment. So, like a prisoner, the kid tries to survive while counting out the remaining days or years of his or her sentence.

I didn't sleep much after a while. I was terrified of what the next day might bring, particularly after 4th grade, when I had a particularly awful teacher. There really was just no escape. By 5th grade I was quite miserable, and I realized that it was becoming a problem.

I had become a "scaredy-cat." I was afraid to do things other kids did, like ride a skateboard. Part of that particular thing was my mom. She made me promise I wouldn't get on a skateboard, because I could fall off and crack my head open. Other kids did it, but she had a point. I was uncoordinated, and lots of things I tried to do, like even playing catch, resulted in me just getting hurt. I was tired of being hurt. But I was also tired of being afraid.

I had taken to just playing tennis in the garage by myself. I was tired of being in the house, but I didn't like going outside anymore because there were always mosquitoes and countless other things out there biting and annoying me. They didn't go in the garage so much, and kids usually didn't see me in the garage. So I'd go in there and hit a tennis ball against the wall, it would bounce back, and I'd hit it again. I got to be kind of good at it, and I took comfort that there was one active thing I could do fairly well without being hurt. Sometimes I'd jump rope in there, thinking of the training sequence in "Rocky", hoping it would make me fit enough that I could fight back at some point and not get hurt.

Finding the key

One day, I took a break and sat down, looking out from the garage. I already knew you could have a disease no one would ever find and die at any time. Things like embolisms, where a blood vessel in your brain or heart would explode and you'd die. Nothing to be done, no way to know.

I also knew freak accidents could happen, just like in "The Omen." My aunt, uncle, and cousins were driving home one night when they were broadsided by a drunk driver. No one was killed, but some were hurt. A neighbor kid across the street was on a ski trip with his parents when he got sick. He was given aspirin, which was normal at the time, and he died in agony from Reye's Syndrome, something I had never heard of. His last words were, "I don't want to die, Mom." But he did. That really bothered me. Shit like that happened all the time.

But what could have been done? My family had to drive home from where they were, and couldn't have predicted the drunk, and the neighbor kid couldn't have prevented being sick.

I also knew that lightning was a real thing. And volcanoes, and earthquakes. A tornado had destroyed most of my town right after we moved there. Meteorites fell to Earth constantly. One could come at any time and plow through my head like a bullet, even if I was in the house. Nothing to be done.

So, looking out on the world, I decided to rejoin it. I decided to do things that were maybe a bit risky, while taking precautions. Pain was just pain. It wouldn't kill me. Injuries could heal. I already had survived pneumonia and flu, plenty of sicknesses and injuries. I had been beaten, stung, bitten. Most things wouldn't kill or cripple me. They just had to be endured and learned from.

I stepped out of the garage, and it felt good. I went to go play with friends I hadn't seen in a while. I tried to do things, and I wasn't always good at them, but I tried. I realized that some stuff, like skiiing or rollerskating, I was never going to be good at, and maybe I didn't have to do them anymore. But other stuff, like tennis or baseball, sure.

I also learned how to fight. Not well, but I learned that other guys didn't want to be hurt either, and that sometimes, when I got them first, they decided they didn't want to be hurt again. They might be stronger than me, since usually they were jocks, and they might be better fighters, but I was often faster, and could take them by surprise. After that, they only went after me if they had the advantage of numbers, and even then, they taunted me from a distance. They started calling me "Spaz", because when I fought them I was no longer a punching bag, I was more of a berserker. Instead of punching a kid in the stomach or mouth, I'd go for the eyes, balls, or throat, and I might use something nearby like a sharpened pencil or my housekey as a weapon.

The world was still a dangerous place, but there were acceptable risks, and I learned to enjoy it again. Sometimes I even enjoyed the danger.

I never went back into the prison box of anxiety again.