From a smartassed standpoint, it’s easy to note that many of the people who claim to have turned out fine look or sound pretty clearly the opposite of fine. That such people unintentionally embody the antithesis of “fine” – that they remain unaware of embodying the emotions therein – makes their not-fineness double the distance between them and whatever passes for fine. And while that’s often true, it’s also a kind of cheap joke. The pernicious, toxic and inescapable lifelong effect of being disciplined physically – either to the point of abuse, or to the point that the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable blurs in your mind – is that you almost have to say you turned out fine, just to redeem the fact of being who you are. That you “turned out fine” is the only way to make sense of having once felt total terror or uncontrollable shaking rage at the sight of one (or both) of the two people expected to care most for you in the world. The thought that you might have ended up relatively OK or perhaps even better without all that fear is almost unbearable: the suffering only doubles if you admit that it truly had no purpose. And you’re glad of who you are, and you’re glad of this moment of becoming a father, but you wonder how fine you really turned out. You can’t say you turned out any other way, because you really are proud to have achieved this much. But you can’t escape the knowledge that many of us – even the best of us – are only as good as the tools we’ve been given. And you know that the one you were given again and again is that violence ends the conversation, and the lesson – however larded with rage, resentment and murderous fantasy – is learned. And you look at someone like Adrian Peterson with the deep, haunting self-mistrust of knowing that he probably learned all his lessons from a beating too, and despite millions of dollars and every opportunity in the world, when he reached for a tool, the only one he thought to grab was a stick. This is a MUST read.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 00:42:12 +0000
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