Self-taught

Write a story about coming to terms with how different you are from your younger self.

That was the assignment we just received for English 101. It obviously assumes there will be differences of varying degrees, but key here is the difficulty of dealing with the difference. A younger self? Or the self we wear inside us? Coming to terms means accepting, getting used to a situation. It is not easy.

What, we must ask, or who, was responsible for the big difference? Then we need to know if difference, in this case, is a good thing that has happened or is it a bad thing? Were we better persons in the past or have we become better persons through the years? Is change good or bad? So many possibilities. 

Not really my problem, except I have to do this assignment. It is going to be really difficult, because it sounds artificial, like a prompt pulled out of a hat or off a yellowed syllabus. Something to yawn over while evaluating the essays.

But I’m not any different, so all the above meanderings sparked by having to reflect on change in ourselves are pretty much irrelevant. I don’t have an answer. I just am no different than I was at, say, fifteen. When I say I’m no different than I was years ago, even back to childhood, I believe it. Maybe I couldn’t wait to get out of Hicksville, but then Hicksville decided to travel along with me when I left. 

That’s my point. You can take it with you, and I will be doing that until the end. For better or for worse.

Like the animal ‘other’ who serves as guide and protector to members of numerous cultures. Like a fairy godmother. Like a guardian angel, a duende, Even like a nereida or sea sprite. Until my town, like a imp decides to switch roles and be Wicked Witch Lady and cast a dark net of a spell over me. Spells from which I eventually return, lugging some new shadow in my soul. 

I am the person I remember; these are my memories. For me, Hicksville is as much Heaven as Hell. I try very hard to let both links co-exist, but it is a struggle. Guess you’ve got to take the good with the bad. Or was it take the bad with the good?

Kingdom and Inferno/Purgatory my dear town that runs through my veins. We are one and the same. Hicksville is my incubus. [Incubus, from the Latin incubo, "nightmare, one who lies down on the person who is sleeping; this describes the legendary evil spirit that crushes sleepers, causes nightmares, makes them feel like they're suffocating.]

Fuseli’s famous nightmare painting is also spot on. That’s me. Us. Inseparable, one of us suffering. One of us suffocating the other.

Another example of how my younger self is the same as my younger self is the fact that I still can listen to music from certain periods or styles and see exactly where I was when the music was on, who was there, etc., etc. I can also sing all - all - the lyrics of any song from 1950 through today. Let me explain. Well, kind of. It’s a theory I came up with. Or just an idea.

I’m betting I have a bit of a photographic memory. Not like Baldacci’s Memory Man Amos Decker, not on that scale, but photographic nonetheless. If I saw something as a child, I can picture it perfectly. Even baby toys are fresh in my mind. So maybe I am a bit like Amos Decker. Without the same bloody tragedy that haunts him. My tragedies have not been bloody, but they have left their mark, just so you know.

This simply means that when I look at toys in stores nowadays, I look at the ones I had, ones that were better made, probably with fewer dangerous chemicals. My toys were the type you kept and passed down to a new recipient. Nowadays toys get shoved in closets or tossed in the trash two months later. I know why: boredom. The toys are useless. Nobody loves plastic. Nobody rubs their hands along the surface and is thrilled. Plastic should never have been invented.

Why shouldn’t I think my toys were better? They were, after all.

I like the same colors, dislike chocolate just as much, still hate fig newtons and still get carsick. I’m still shy, not afraid of worms but don’t like snakes. Also, I still have a thing for books. Maybe I should explain.

Put a book in front of me, tell me what it’s about, then leave me alone with it. That has always meant opening the cover and drifting toward the pages, drifting into them. Book as world, as my world, for as long as I continued to read it. 

When I die - wrote Lorca - bury me on a weathervane, if you please! 

When I die - write I - bury me in a book, oh please!

The ways I am still my younger, smaller me, are many, too many to list. The previous examples were merely to give an idea of what ties me to my former self. Meaning that it is going to be extremely difficult to complete the assignment as given. Maybe a change in perspective will help. I could try looking at Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey to see if I can find how different I was then from now. But no, I am Wordsworth’s wanderer, looking homeward to his place of origin:

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And there is no place but the first one for those who are like me. Every interior, every exterior, builds on the first ones I knew. There is no escape, this may be a type of unearned torture, but maybe there is a sense of gratitude for not having (been) forgotten. As Wordsworth wrote:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

Perennial nurture, and poison. It all depends on the memories. Not the weather, not the special occasion, not the people present. How could I ever leave this behind?

John Clare’s “I am the self-consumer of my woes,” from the nineteenth century, comes to mind. If I continue to consume, to be nourished by my past, am I not acting as Clare’s verse says? This begins to sound tragic. Self-cannibalism. So I think of Sylvia Plath’s depression and recall these lines from Ariel:

Something else

Hauls me through air—

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel—

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

I cannot help Plath improve her situation, which as we all know, did not end well. Nor can I help Clare with his mental challenges around 1840. Wordsworth seemed to have managed fairly well, but we will try not to think of Lorca’s violent end. He was prepared for it, as we can see in his poems.

And so after all this, it doesn’t look good for me. I have not been able to get free of who, what, where, why, when I was growing up in Hicksville. Everything I did or read or wrote from the time I could hold a pencil on lined paper to make the letters has come from a storybook place. Maybe one writer said you can’t go home again, but another revealed that Peter Pan exists and will be a boy forever. 

I have a hundred more examples that will prove Life is a continuum, or maybe a yellow brick road, or a lane near a woods on a snowy evening. Things we have the right to learn about, see, or do even at a young age. Things we have the right to keep with us. Things that remain the same, as they should.

Epilogue (One week later):

I’ve gotten my essay back. The professor has written that I didn’t exactly follow the prompt, but she had decided to ignore that. She gave me a good grade.

What makes me happiest, nevertheless, is that little thing called continuity. 

I salvaged a lot from those early years and wasn’t about to toss them aside. Hicksville wasn’t about to let me, either.

Someday I might write a story about that.

About not running away