Meta: So many songs we forgot to play

[kiya]

Why does it feel actively transgressive to speak of my childhood as something important, formative, something with people in it whose presence I miss as an adult, something that promised things that circumstances meant never happened?

Why do my traumas from that age feel like things that it's okay to have still mattering to me, resonating with me, but loves and friendships and triumphs of that age are things that I can only speak of with a sense that I ought to feel shame that I have not outgrown them?

Why do I feel the urge to reclaim my childhood, hold it close to me and tell the nay-sayers that it matters, when I can think of few cases of me being directly told that I cherished its jewels too much or that it is not worthy of consideration?

Why do I feel that the things called the "formative years" in some rhetorical treatments of childhood are only things I can be formed by if they were pain? Why is the joyfulness (and the sadness of loss of potential joys) something that I feel self-conscious about remembering?

Is it just me? Or am I responding to something geniunely fucked up in the world around me?

Do I transgress? Fine. Then I transgress.

Mine.

Comments

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Mine.

Indeed so.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I think this must be a cultural difference or something. Because I don't have this feeling. If anything, until recently, it was almost the opposite, that I wasn't supposed to talk about the negative things. Mind you, I had a pretty trauma-free childhood overall, but there were nevertheless things that affected me badly.

Enjoy your happy childhood experiences and the contribution they made to who you are now.

[kiya]

The feeling, now that I tease it out a little, goes something like this:

Stuff that happened before approximately puberty doesn't count or matter. If one thinks it matters or holds that it has significant meaning or import now, one isn't grown-up enough, doesn't have a sound sense of perspective, or other somethings I can't articulate.

If it's negative stuff that one is hung up on, that's sad but understandable; it is generally known that that sort of thing hangs around. It would be better not to have any of it at all, of course, but being fixated on puerile stuff and getting stuck at that age is recognised as a response to trauma.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I think I understand what you're saying here, and I do get some resonance, but not with my own childhood.

Thinking about it, I think this is because my childhood partly happened in another country and partly happened in the proccess of adapting to this country. And no-one who has met me is in any doubt that part of what makes me what I am is that I was born and grew up in another country, and that I moved at a particular age. So I get a cultural "allowance", not for Bad Stuff, but for Major Life-Changing Stuff.

There's a second component to this, and that is that every so often I feel at odds with the culture around me, and when that happens, I just assume it's because I'm from another culture originally. Thus I don't feel any distress or internal pressure when I don't match the surrounding culture.

I realised at some point that I had an implicit assumption that the discrepancy meant that I was matching my original culture, and that isn't necessarily true, of course.

I think it's quite okay for me not to be particularly clued-in about certain aspects of my original culture because psychologically it creates such a solid, comfortable base for "I am at odds with the surrounding culture, this does not mean there is anything wrong with me (or the surrounding culture)".

Of course, I also think that anyone who claims that I'm fixated on puerile stuff for still being in touch with myself when younger is going to get laughed at. Yeah, there have been some experiences that did cause trauma and hangups and I did recover from them (and there's probably some still to go) but there were also lovely experiences and I'm not about to pretend they didn't happen. I don't want to remove those influences from my psyche the way that I've removed the impact of certain traumas. Exactly where is the healthy, mature, adult aquaeri supposed to come from? Thin air?

I think there's a rant about shallowness of perception, trying to deny the importance of historical contingency in the current situation, lurking under all this.

I think I will now try to go away and write something without so many "think" and derivatives in it.

[kiya]

I think there's a rant about shallowness of perception, trying to deny the importance of historical contingency in the current situation, lurking under all this.

I've got a rant about the trivialisation of childhood around somewhere that's where I'm coming from. I suspect it ties into the idea of "childhood purity and innocence" somewhere, if I start digging at it.

Every so often I stumble across a few rounds of what translates to me as "What happened before adolescence is not real life, it's trivialities and play-in-pejorative-sense, and taking it as having any importance is clearly false and requires no explanation for why it can be dismissed."

There was one a while back where someone asked people to write about first loves, and I wrote about mine, and got a response (from the person soliciting these) of, more or less, "Ha ha cute, but you're supposed to be responding to this with your first real love. You know, as an adult."

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

There was one a while back where someone asked people to write about first loves, and I wrote about mine, and got a response (from the person soliciting these) of, more or less, "Ha ha cute, but you're supposed to be responding to this with your first real love. You know, as an adult."

Permit me to strangle this person on your behalf. I can understand why there's a rant building up.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I have noticed that in "outsider" circles, such as geek cultures, bad childhoods appear to have been the rule, and bad experiences are the parts of childhood which come up in conversation. It can leave one feeling somewhat sheepish about saying, "actually, I loved Girl Scout camp."

[darkwolf58.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I used to feel guilty because my parents are still married and I didn't hate them growing up.

[redbird]

That pain teaches does not mean that only pain teaches.

[ckd]

Oh, I need to save this line.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Me too.

[thastygliax.livejournal.com]

Hmm, maybe I should let you read the char-gen section of GURPS Goblins. In that setting, "formative years" means "unrelenting torture that directly determines your adult morphology." It might cheer you up, in a "it could be worse" sort of way... ;-)

On a more serious note: Cherish the good stuff in your past, and cherish the strength you gained from surviving the bad.

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

It's not just you. I can talk endlessly about the badness. With grace and elegance, if other people are believed. But, the good.... I dunno. I know that it's there, I think. But it's hard to name it. I don't know if it's a transgression to name it, or if it's just Not Done. Or if that distinction even makes sense.

I think that the thing that you wrote about your childhood was a thing of beauty and importance, that *should* cherised. And it was right and good that you wrote it. If that helps.

And I think that it goes on my list of things that should be done, this summer, that I should try to remember some of my own good, from that time.