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Bens Blog
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Written by Ben Wolf
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Saturday, 31 January 2009 19:00 |
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02-01-2009
Children learn boundaries properly with correctly administered adult guidance. Being as such, I have a personal theory that the overabundance of kids these days without any sense of what's what, in terms of what the point of their existence is, stems from a serious shortage of adult guidance that is being correctly administered.
This seems self-evident to me, but at the same time I acknowledge the possibility of my being prejudice in this area because as a teenager, I wound up as oblivious to the pure and simple fact that there are things other than finding drugs that should be taken seriously and considered in the big picture, and, in hindsight, at 29 years old, I attribute it to incorrectly administered such and such. My parents should not be blamed; they had to work, and somebody had to watch me. I should also put forth that, based on everything I've come to understand about what I was like as a child from the accounts of the people who took care of me at various times, I was basically impossible to figure out and deal with. So, there's that.
About 6 months before my 18th birthday, I was just a mess. I was about 3 years of schooling yet behind getting a diploma, something I hadn't taken seriously in about a year because as far as I knew, there was no way for me to get back into school anyway, after being suspended over and over from high school, and then expelled from alternative ed, too, after I couldn't even get that right. I wasn't even thinking about any of this, though, because I had a system for getting a steady supply of weed, and in the instances where that failed, it was easy for me to steal liquor, and inhalants were readily available anywhere; there are dozens upon dozens of products...okay, anyway...I was just locked in this cycle of up, up, and away, oh I feel so perfect, this is everything, I'm golden, The music, the lights, I can breathe now, down, down, down to drowning town in agony, my mind hurts so bad, burning, why did she do that do me, I feel sick, just need to sleep, need to burn myself again, got to get out of here, panic, you get the picture.
I just could not seem to break away from that. [I cannot believe the grammar checker on Word doesn't have a problem with that sentence.]
I'd quit tripping on acid about 5 months prior to this because I blamed it messing with my mind for the inescapability of where I felt I was, but I was also on five psychotropic medications at once, and I am inclined to believe that they couldn't have been helping things any, either.
Anyway, I put down earlier about how I'd gone to that church with that friend of mine and everything; that whole scenario was kind of the only thing that I felt had been real that I'd known in a long time. By real, I mean like when you're little and mom says, "Dinner is in five minutes," and it actually is. Everything else in my life, the situation with school, relationships with girls and friends, my family; I just didn't get any of it at all anymore.
It was like it had all been torn apart and pasted back together a million times and now it was all just nonsense, but the Jesus that I had prayed to and given my life to, He was the deus ex machina that I was convinced in my heart was going to somehow fix everything. I mean, I'd given it to Him, and as I understood it based on what I felt in my heart and comprehended in my mind, He'd like it to be cleaned out and fixed up. This didn't happen the way I wanted it to, that is, I wasn't magically changed overnight into a competent, stable, sober, properly functioning human. In a sense, though, that such an end was ever achieved with what there was to work with, from my perspective at least was a feat approaching that kind of miraculous quality.
The only thing that changed me was love.
Love that received me with open arms and warm approval, and made me experience love back towards the One who would put all the power that had brought the universe into being into my restoration from the nothing I'd become; love that would inspire confidence in me to receive correction and learn to believe that I could fulfill my potential.
I'd known rigidly delineated boundaries my whole life and laughed in the face of them. I'd played chicken with the law over and over; it's cold, lifeless structure, barren of vigor and spontaneity making me sick and need to cry out in remonstration. The whole time I had been seeing these boundaries and structures as devices to oppress and control with cruel indifference, because that's how I'd interpreted their being presented to me as a child, but it wasn't actually so.
People who do good out of a good heart don't do it to hurt people, and if someone is "doing good" and it hurts people, then what they are doing, they are doing in conjunction with their own demons, so that they can get what they wrongfully want or think they need, while fulfilling what they think are the requirements to walk the straight and narrow, which they're scared out of their mind to not do, and so inflict this fear and dread on others under the auspices of doing them a favor.
What I mean to say is, when an authority figure corrects you, and instead of being corrected you are only frustrated and confused, then maybe instead of blaming the concept of law or God and hating them, you should consider that this person may in all probability be in direct violation with the actual spirit of what they are trying to instill in you, that is, making an effort to help you grow and abusing you at the same time, like the lady at the grocery store who loses her temper and whips her 7 year old around by one arm and screams at the poor kid, thinking that this is going to teach him not to be out of control.
I know we've all seen that lady.
If you are that lady, I apologize for being abrasive. It's a good example and I needed one. We're all an example of something, or at least I've never met someone who wasn't.
I was all for going to rehab. I'd heard that all kinds of celebrities skip out to Minnesota to kick bad habits in fancy clinics, and while I knew that I wouldn't end up at one of those, it seemed like it would be an adventure nonetheless. I was in agreement that some dramatic changes needed to happen with my life's direction if anything good was going to come out of it and that if left to my own devices, it just wasn't going to happen.
Once I actually got there, though, and I ran out of cigarettes, and realized that no, I wasn't going to be able to keep smoking at this place either, and that they would only feed me what was necessary, at fixed times, for limited durations...and I was withdrawing from most of the psychotropic meds, (I'd been allowed to continue with Dexedrine and Desoryl, it being believed too dangerous to come off the one after 10 years of morning and night, and impossible for me to sleep at night without the other) and I was used to being high or drunk all the time and so was really mad in general...as soon as all of this started happening to me at once, I went completely ape.
The first morning, being woken up at 6 with the promise of some awful discipline in the event of noncompliance, I bounded down the steps to the office (the building was in one of those four story, two wide, three deep apartment buildings that had been around for God knows how long, and so the "office" was one of the apartment units that we each shared with three or four other people) and demanded to call my parents. I told my dad that I was going to lose it really quick if he didn't come back and retrieve me, and that it was going to be either here or jail that he'd need to get me from.
"Ben," he informed me, "I'm not going to come pick you up from jail." And that was that. My dad had probably thought that I wouldn't actually do something to get thrown in jail, and that he was calling my bluff. At that point in life, I'd had an extremely short fuse and a kind of big mouth, and dangerous places like jail had always been a real crapshoot for me.
Suffice it to say that I was almost continually injured as a teenager, and that not all of these injuries were from simply being too drunk. When asked I would always just say that I'd been wrestling with so and so and hit my face on an end table or that I'd fallen down some stairs or something, and at the time I thought these were great lies. I mean, they're not, I see that now.
Well, my dad was actually right, I had been bluffing when I said that I'd wind up in jail, so I had to figure out how to get kicked out of the place without getting kicked out too hard...
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