As a child, I convinced myself…
… that I’d only be noticed if I exploded.
In the Twilight Zone “It’s a Good Life”, Billy Mumy plays Anthony, a little boy who holds a small town in thrall because of his ability to destroy anything at his whim. If you upset him, the best you can hope for is annihilation in “the cornfield”.
As a result, the adults pretend to be as nice as possible to Anthony. Their emotions are clearly faked, because if he senses you don’t like him, it’s the cornfield, or worse.
I have had an explosive temper most of my life. I’d like to think I’ve gotten better as I’ve gotten older, but as a child, it was definitely bad. I got used to people pretending to be nice to me to calm me down. Enough that I didn’t know when people were being sincerely nice, and when people were just trying to palliate me.
It didn’t help that my father decided that I was destined to greatness, and so greatness was the default. When I excelled, I was ignored. When I exploded, I was noticed.
Whether it was true or not, I felt like the only time I got something I wanted was when I whined for it, and then I didn’t know if I was getting it because someone really cared or if they were afraid of being sent to the cornfield.
This round of these thoughts started yesterday. One of the school groups had some left over candy and decided to put one in every teacher’s mailbox until they ran out. The announcement said they had started at the end of the alphabet and kept going to the beginning, but they’re run out. But when I went to my mailbox, there were candies in mailboxes after mine and before mine and… none in mine.
I didn’t want candy. I’m trying to avoid candy. But it felt like a snub, or like someone else had stolen my candy, and after the week that I’d had, it was a paper cut across a fresh wound.
I’ll forget about it. I’m more upset that I’m upset about it. It locked me into a familiar thought pattern: That I would try to explain what I was upset about to a bunch of people who would then get mad at me for being upset about not getting something I didn’t want, and call me a child.
As I wrote that last paragraph, I remembered another trauma: In elementary school, I had visited a ship with my family. I had gotten a small bag of iron ore pellets as a souvenir. I took the bag to show and tell and let my classmates look at the bag. They thought that meant they could take one if they wanted, but it was MY bag and MY iron ore, and when I got the mostly empty bag back, I complained. So they pelted me with the iron ore while the teacher did… nothing that I remember. Hopefully something. That part has been erased from the memory entry.
Anyway, I don’t know how to end this, so this is the end.