I really think there is a time in most lives when some basic choice is made. I remember making the choice myself and it was at a young age - grade school. I was teased and tormented a lot, because I looked different [very Celtic coloring, curly hair] and acted different [books, good grades, quietish] in a neighborhood where the 'accepted' look was far from mine and caring about school marked you for life.
I remember thinking to myself how much it hurt me to be treated as I was treated.
I remember thinking to myself that I would never want to cause that kind of pain to anyone else on such shallow pretexts - although I didn't use 'shallow pretexts' at age 6; it was more like 'about things like this that don't really matter as much as what kind of person you are'.
I remember deciding that I just wouldn't.
I also remember, unfortunately, all the subsequent teasing and tormenting, the using and the abusing, the exploitation and entrapment and other good things down the ensuing years, the things that finally instilled in me enough rage and bitterness and sense of futility and waste, that I did begin, in fact, to strike back.
It took a LOOOOONG time, though, for that to happen. And I'm never proud of it when it does.
I'm trying to learn to strike a balance now. To confront without fear, and to accept that sometimes that is going to be futile. That sometimes I'm going to be wrong in my decision to confront, that it may be driven by my own personal tastes more than by the real merits of the situation.
So much to learn...
But I do believe, in every life, on some level, if we are ever aware, that choice confronts us and must be made.
I wonder what I would be like, what my life would have been like, if I had chosen the other way.
