Being a better beaver
I think I figured out the core of all my issues and unique powers:
I basically never let go of that cartoonishly loving praise from childhood parenting. Like, at some point the passage into adulthood is breaking through the parenthood Truman Show placenta and letting your raw self be hardened by the real world. To some degree I’ve done that, but also…I fuckin ate the placenta or something, like I stuck it deep in my brain and protected it and kept it from rotting. I distinctly remember as a child thinking
“Why is everyone trying to be so fucking hard in middleschool? I love thinking I’m the most wonderful boy in all of the land, I know it’s not based on any objective merit but the high is just too great.”
And my entire life has been this weird dance through the minefield while holding my love drug pcp pacifier of childhood. It’s why I’m immature, why I love childhood and children and their innocence kinda makes me choke up. It’s a fuckin hard world and love truly is the coating to make it all worthwhile. I think the part where I fucked up was not trading my parental placenta for a coating of friend-love (for many reasons). I think this is explains why I don’t feel too needy of other’s approval (tho I actually super am). Over the past few years I’ve been trying to learn to be vulnerable to folks who aren’t my immediate family and immediate-family-like friends. It’s hard because I know they will never give the same level of love. Unconditional love for example is so rare because in many ways it’s stupid. But it is heroin while friendlove is, I dunno, great but not that.
I feel like a much more capable and less frantic person since I my interactions are no longer “UNCONDITIONAL LOVE OR I DON’T NEED YOU!” type, and are instead more “Hey…hehe umm…what do you think if I’m like this?” “Oh, ok that feedback feels painful/great, thank you for your time and exposure of this side of me.” I’ve come away a bit more aware of myself and how I can genuinely connect with the larger world of grownups (probably also a Truman Show shell).
There is a 9yr old inside me that calls caring what others think “Acting PHONY” because it remembers a time when donning tested personality prosthetics was the quickest way to up the positive feedback odds. But nowadays that option is so clearly lame that the only other alternative is to be a better beaver. The beauty is that the river of expression still gushes from the same magical spring of me-ness but it’s my job as a social being to direct it, dam it, and tap it (and twist it and bop it). I’ve come to realize that with this approach I’m being a person who genuinely cares instead of someone who kinda disingenuously doesn’t care.
Maybe you have gone through this transition? Probably round middleschool? Maybe you are still going through it? I’m genuinely curious how cool and hardened folks feel or if they too are carrying around a little gross pacifier covered in hair and crumbs.