Growing Up Means Claiming Your Own Mind

Dig, ponder, dig some more.

A year ago I wrote a column about some of the early moments of my growing up – not just memories but profound moments of awareness; flickers, you might say, of becoming who I am. I was 77 at the time. Now I’m . . . oh yeah, 78. Can you believe it? Another year is almost over. Holiday season shimmers, the smell of pine is in the air. It’s Christmas: a perfect time to open, once again, the stocking known as memory.

In last year’s column, I wrote about three childhood moments that created me as a person – or informed me that I had changed, moved forward in the process of becoming. These were moments of self-awareness. Gosh! I had no idea such a thing existed, but there I was at age six, playing “Red Rover” on my elementary-school playground with a bunch of other kids and I realized: I was part of something bigger than myself; I wasn’t alone. Run and play, laugh and love! It’s called “community” (I later learned).

A second moment of becoming: I was 10 and had gotten into a fight after school – with a good pal. Huh? I rode my bike home, parked in the alley behind my house and stood there rubbing my bruised elbow, aswirl in confusion. Fighting is so stupid! I decided I would never fight again – or rather, knew I would never fight again. I knew I had changed.

The third moment I wrote about was when I was 13. I had just seen a strange, disturbing movie with my mother and sister called Imitation of Life. We had car trouble on the way home and as we waited for the repair work to be finished, a puzzling awareness hit me, totally out of the blue. “I’m a genius,” I told myself – not with a smirk that I’m smarter than you are, but just the opposite. I was overwhelmed. Life isn’t preset. It’s an endless flow of God-knows-what, and it’s up to me – it’s up to all of us – to assign meaning, as best we can, to what’s going on. We’re all creating the future, moment by moment, whether we know it or not.

Yikes. This was far more responsibility than I was comfortable with, but I was stuck with it. I pushed on with growing up. These were all private moments, quietly “me” in a way that was no one else’s business. But some inner balloon (pardon the childish metaphor) was getting ready to burst. I had lousy penmanship, but I was turning into a writer, even though I hardly knew it. In fact, I got a “D” in English in eighth grade because I just couldn’t grasp the rules of grammar that were dumped on us out of the bag of marbles called education. What the heck is a participle? What’s an indirect object?

Attention, grade fanatics: We all learn at our own speed and in our own way. Two years later, in 10th grade, one of the books we were assigned to read was The Diary of Anne Frank. Birth of a writer! Well, sort of. I was riveted by her words, by the details of her life she bequeathed the world – and I felt a deep compulsion to start my own journal.

It literally took a year of trying. I’d buy a 39-cent notebook and start putting pieces of my life into words, usually prefaced with the warning: “Private. Do not read!” I felt compelled to pump up the importance of what I was saying, to write from the perspective that my life was significant. And the journal would never last more than a day or two. I could feel the phoniness in my words and would stash the notebook on a shelf, to be forgotten. But I kept trying! Something in me was determined to make this process work – solely for myself, of course. Turns out that may be the hardest audience of all to win over.

And then – I’m 16 at this point, in 11th grade – something happened: I was certain, I was terrified, that I had failed a solid geometry test one day. When I got home, I opened a notebook and scribbled the words: “God, I am worried. Scared to death is more like it.”

And the words simply flowed. I couldn’t stop. I went on for four pages, writing about the test, writing about how lousy I was doing in my English class, and then . . . yee-haw! I started writing about my “barren social life”: about the all the parties I hadn’t been invited to and my fear that I was a lousy dancer. I wasn’t “trying” to say anything; I was just letting it all out, spewing my feelings with unchecked honesty.

Two days later I wrote a second entry. Turns out I actually did OK on the math test, much to my amazement. And I was feeling good. I wrote about driving to a Junior Achievement meeting with some friends and singing a bunch of inappropriate songs on the way home. I even inserted the lyrics into the notebook. Something was happening: I wasn’t trying to churn out “good writing.” I was simply writing – giving words to my emotions and bringing them to life. I was finding, as I put it many years later, my voice.

And yeah, this is what growing up is all about. There’s nothing special or unique about any of this – it’s just a smattering of specificity. The interesting part, for me, as I write about it six-plus decades later, is to be able to feel the moment of becoming – to feel it as a new chunk of being, given to me almost as a Christmas present, not by Santa but by Anne Frank . . .and so many others: my parents, of course. My friends. My teachers.

Indeed, I must take a moment to honor Mom and Dad. They gave me life, home, family – and something more: the permission, you might say, to go my own direction. This was not easy for them, especially for my mother, who was a devout Lutheran, who had to watch her son break from the church and head off in his own spiritual direction.

Among the books I read in high school, three of them had a serious impact on my becoming: The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Their words were rocks for me to grab as I climbed the mountain of my emerging life. At one point, as I was writing in my journal, I made the declaration that I was a non-conformist. And one of the final tasks I had to fulfill before I graduated was to write my senior paper: a big-deal assignment. The topic could be of my choosing, but I had to quote a number of recognized authors. I chose the above trio. The paper was called “Is a Man’s Mind His Own?”

Yes, I wrote, it is.

I had sort of known this all along, though without necessarily even wanting it to be the case, except, as a boy, having the right to misbehave. But this was a serious step beyond boyhood. It was my first real step into the public domain. Uh oh. Now what?

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