You haven’t really lived, haven’t really been cracked out of your cocoon of ignorance, haven’t been faced with a true test of your character until you have had your whining, sweaty ass handed to you on a thick, splintered, bloody stick, slammed into the mud like an exclamation point, done with drama like the Marines in that famous Joe Rosenthal World War II photo. The Marines, the victor, are raising the flag on Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima.
You’re not the victor. You’re the recipient of absolute defeat and humiliation at the hands of your conqueror.
Your conqueror comes in many forms: rejection, loneliness, mockery, failure. You reach a point in your life in which you’re startled to find that your self-image wasn’t as grand and as invincible as you had once thought. You’re forced to re-evaluate who you are, respond to that re-evaluation and in the process choose if you’re going to be someone with no resilience and learning power and as such become a walking corpse or be someone who is made stronger and smarter.
I had my ass handed to me on a stick in 1984. My first girlfriend Laura, an aspiring singer, broke up with me and wasn’t content to leave me an abandoned sack of rejected zero self-esteem. She had this need to peel off my skin and pour battery acid on it after she dumped me. She achieved this in two ways. First, she explained that when she was my girlfriend, she was living in darkness, filth, and decrepitude. She had died, but luckily had found resurrection. The manner of her rebirth points to the second way she poured acid into my wounds: She explained that her new boyfriend made everything in her life better. She looked better. She felt better. Food tasted better. The oxygen that she breathed inhaled better. She had no choice but to marry this dude because after all compared to me he was just better.
For two years I believed her narrative and saw myself as a disease to not just her but to all women. I didn’t date. The only way a woman should even get close to me, I lamented, was if she was wearing a HAZMAT suit.
And then two years later Laura and her miracle man divorced and it hit me: Everything she had told me about a better life was, in spite of her sincerity, complete bullshit.
I learned that I was gullible and too quick to believe people’s condemning words of me. The experience left me skeptical about everything. Now if someone berates me, I nod and think, “Is that so?” If someone praises me,” I nod and think, “Is that so?” If I watch an Olive Garden commercial in which a voice with a thick Italian accent says, “Food so good, you’ll think your grandma made it,” I nod my head and think, “Is that so?”
Having my ass handed to me on a stick made me slow to believe the hype, negative or positive, about me or anything else. And it taught me that I can be my own worst enemy, joining evil forces in my own demise when I don’t challenge my nemesis.
I’ve had my ass handed to me since then, but that was my first and in a perverse way my most treasured.
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