I know someone who had a terrible childhood. Not just bad, or BAD, but genuinely terrible. The ingredients of a domestic horror novel, or the worst kind of OLIVER TWIST/Charles Dickens tale of deprivation and woe. Yet this person grew up to be not only a solid citizen, but a gem– one of the few people I know who is truly special in many ways. Is their specialness a result of having had those bad experiences when they were young but prevailing in spite of them? I don’t know. I don’t know if they know. Recently it struck me that there are important people in our lives for both good things and bad. And much as we hate to admit it, the bad things-people in certain cases had more positive effect(s) on our development than the good people. An example: A successful painter I know was the child of a highly respected artist. He had an on again/off again relationship with his father all his young life and even more so when he realized that he wanted to be an artist too. In his early twenties, he made a series of paintings that he was very proud of and excited about. When he finished this “cycle,” the first person he showed the work to was his father. The old man looked at them for a long time and then said “Son, they’re shit.” Then he went on to criticize them unmercifully. Years later the son told me that that was one of the paradigm moments in his life. It clearly demonstrated several essential, defining things that changed him forever. 1. My father really is a bastard and now is the perfect time to cut certain essential chords between us permanently 2. I don’t think my pictures are shit and I’m going to keep on this same “line” no matter what the old man or anyone else says 3. Despite how much people say they love or care about you, they usually have their own vision of how you should “be” in the world. If you don’t accept their vision of who you are and what you should be doing, there’s bound to be trouble between the two of you. Whether it was the friend who had the terrible childhood but rose out of it like a phoenix from the ashes and today is a shining example for everyone who knows them. Or the artist whose father’s “gift” to him was that cruel gratuitous insult, both of these people have succeeded at least in part because they were capable of a kind of human alchemy– they discovered within themselves the capacity to transform the ‘shit’ of their bad experiences into gold.
Jonathan Carroll
2087
stormborns
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