this burn

Last weekend i was cleaning out some boxes which had lain in storage for years, and discovered some papers.
They made my spirit recoil.
I felt burning shame, one of those spirit-maiming emotions i've travelled so far from.
The papers contained words i'd written as an eighteen year-old.
The nature of my shame makes it hard for me to write this...as though my words could never be other than clod-footed, inelegant lies. (go away, go away, here be lies, here be lies...) I was ashamed that i had managed in my pitiful adult existence to convince a few wretches that i was any kind of worthy writer. The shame was so sharp that it invalidated any word i've ever spoken, or any word i might ever write. Were i to meet a person who wrote such words, an eternal gag order would be insufficient.
Euthanization might be proper.
It took me a day or two before i was smiling at myself, as we all must.
It's rare that we get a window into our past that really throws us. We all construct our lives in such a way that we forget or eliminate people or things that might expose us in a way we do not wish to be seen. We're constantly offering to the world the story of our life, editing into oblivion any element we don't happen to like very much.
What threw me?
Two college newsletters from a high school youth club i'd been a part of. Off at institutions of higher learning (nah, screw that, i went to West Chester University, which only became a "university" because it sounded better), we each sent home a paragraph on our lives, which were then assembled and mailed out to everyone. At the time i wrote my paragraphs, they seemed a delightful, perfect expression of who i was.
I suppose they were.
To read them now, through the eyes of anyone who might have seen them back then, puts a burning lump in my guts and makes me reassess anyone who had dealings with me during those years.
I don't offer those words to you here. They went back into storage. Am i protecting you, or myself? Both.
The words are so mawkish, so stilted, so excruciatingly self-conscious and disconnected, that were i to meet someone who wrote such words, i might take them by the neck and shout "WHY ARE YOU FUCKING TRYING SO HARD???"
It's bizarre to understand the person i was from the age of fifteen to twenty. In some ways, i was genuinely living a state of grace. But it was also a state of denial, and almost megalomania.
I was the happiest person in the world (or you couldn't have convinced me i wasn't, which amounts to the same thing). At fifteen, i had a teen identity crisis. I decided i didn't like who i was, in the eyes of others. So i became someone new. I stopped eating meat. I stopped drinking. I stopped eating sweets. I began lifting weights. My interest in theater turned into a grand passion. I became enormously upbeat and outgoing.
Those were some years. My college freshman year, i recall bursting out loud laughing while walking down the street, just because it was so AMAZING to be alive!
Ah, youth?
I've never had a problem cherishing the strange person i was in those years...even once i understood why that part of my life happened, it was still easy to embrace it as a time of immense joy which has ever and always informed who i am. We all should be so lucky once or twice in our lives.
Nor did i ever whitewash my memory of those years...it's just that i'd never before had such a stark window into that time, wherein i could so easily see myself, and realize for the first time how out of synch my self-perception probably was with other's perceptions of me.
Eventually, through theater and one special professor who helped me break down walls i hadn't imagined existed, i realized i'd been living inside a profoundly elaborate defense mechanism.
Such that one future day, i would rediscover some long-stashed words, and cringe at what i once was.
Do i ever seem hard on fools and hypocrites? Yes, but that's a pale shadow of how hard i learned to be on myself, as a youth.
No child or pubescent you've ever known has gotten the full measure of human love they've needed. Most of us survive, but none of us thrive, and we spend the rest of our lives chasing the ghost of the person we were meant to be.