What I want to be, when I grow up

I want first, to be able to hear what people have to say, and know what they're thinking and feeling. I want to be able to know someone's heart - not have it replace mine or be swept up in what they feel necessarily - but I want to really be able to listen to someone. All the great men I look up to could do this. Thomas Jefferson. P.A.M. Dirac. Albert Einstein. Von Karajan. Bono. All great listeners.

Then, I want to be wealthy. Not just money, but also family and , for lack of a better term - in love. I want to have a big heart. I want to be like old Fezziwig, in Charles Dicken's "A Christmas Carol". I want people to enjoy themselves at my home. I want to play music that they like, and not creep them out by playing some three chord song about pain and death. Fun stuff like "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". .... just checking! :-)

I want to be wise. I want to have the fear of the lord in me - for all of you atheists out there (ok,at least I know there is one of you here) - I want to have that deep respect for the processes of nature and life that will claim me and by which my consciousness arises, and will live beyond my mortal existence; to be able to listen to the still small voice within. I want to have knowledge and skill but I don't want to flaunt it. I want it to grow by watching others learn what I know, by my teaching of it that encourages a new look with their eyes upon the matter - I want to learn by doing and to discover that to teach , is to learn. And I want to respect all faiths, and also be able to offer and transmit my own to those that I care about and love. And I will be happy if any of it all works, and not be too discouraged if knowledge does not survive - I want to commit it to a medium that lets my learning, my knowledge, and perhaps even a bit of my soul - carry on and hopefully do what I could not through time.

I love children and when I grow up I want lots of them. I want children to be taught well, that in their later days they do not depart from it. And yet I want them to be creative and think their way out of tricky situations too. I want to have lots of kids. And I want them to have fun while growing up, but I want them to know where the limits of life are so they can push them later. And most importantly, in the early part of the 21st century - I want to see them play - really play - not just connect to some kind of electronic medium. I want to see drinks on the store shelves that contain less sugar than candy bars. I want them to eat food that doesn't contain bad chemicals , that are there only to save money. And I want them to have healthy social relationships and to sky their academics.

What I want most - is to be a responsible, decent person that everyone can rely upon + help build a corner of the world that is adventurous, fun and safe, maybe even a little kinky, and I want to use my gift of sight and expression to discover something that has never been discovered before, and write about it in a way that everyone can understand.

Comments

Laura Palmer said…



Sometimes it’s incredible how terribly I miss the perfect feeling of your arms holding me, of being wrapped around each other, my skin can almost sense it. A wave of hurt will crest inside my chest around the same time, or shortly thereafter. Hurt, and the thought-voice that feels Dead On Nailed It, but is actually a liar, kicks in with “Nobody ever wanted you and Nobody ever will- You don’t get to have that”. It feels the way it always did the hundreds of thousands of times I’ve heard and felt it before. It’s 100% The Way Things Are and The Way Things Go for me. Doing battle with that shit sucks so bad. Pushing back against it the way I’m supposed to feels limp and inadequate.

Sometimes when my dad drank, he looked just like himself and was outwardly calm, but his usual personality was gone and in its place was a mean, resentful man. On breaks from college, I would give my mom some money to reimburse her for my occasional long distance calls to catch up with 2 or 3 college friends. I’d just been talking to my friend Larry from Philadelphia, who was heavily into industrial and gothic-industrial music, in addition to lots of other interesting stuff. My dad had apparently been drinking in his & Mom’s bedroom next door for some time, watching tv. He materialized in the doorway suddenly, filling it, and looking hard at me with a very calm but unnerving expression.

“Who do you think you are?” he asked, quietly.

He was dead serious. I froze- confused, scared, and dismayed, I tried to explain to him that I always paid Mom back for my phone calls. He cut me off. “I don’t care- I don’t want to hear it.” He kept his eyes locked on my face, and continued to interrogate me about….having the nerve to be his daughter and use his phone, I guess…I honestly don’t remember what happened right after that, but I told Mom worriedly about it the next day about how I was In Trouble (the prospect of which always scared me too much, and still does).

She rolled her eyes and told me to ignore that and forget it, that he didn’t mean it, he was just being a jerk and I wasn’t in trouble. He never referred to it, and never apologized. It just sat there in my experience and emitted toxic radiation that’s slowly decomposing, but not fucking fast enough for me. That brief moment is stored with lots and lots of other troubling incidents. I wish I could ignite all those stored experiences into a firestorm. To burn them all the way down into floating specks of ash, and never remember or feel them again.

I feel sad for my youngest self, unable to ask someone to please look at her, talk to her, & hold her close in your arms for a while. Talk to her and treat her as though she matters, as though she’s very important to you. Neither of my parents knows that the mystery of why my self-esteem has always been so shitty has been solved. It would break their hearts to know that they had anything to do with it. I can’t do that to them.