a thread for reacting to the "10-year-old you" thread

I mean, holy God:

One of my best friends, Scott, lives in the same building, and we are constantly in each other's homes, wreaking havoc but basically having a grand time (in thirteen years time, he will die on his wedding night).

...it's like, I can feel what it's like running around through the halls of the apartment building with Scott & hanging out, so vividly, and then he dies in the next half of the sentence...that thread, you guys, Jesus.

10 was so both/and for me! that was part of what made my entry so difficult for me: there was a lot of really ouch-that-smarts pain that year, as my family's life began heading in a direction from which we would not escape until I was seventeen, but there was also the way that the things I found funny started to get lots funnier, the joy of getting smarter, and so on.

I thought about "14-year-old you," too, but there's be a hell of a lot of blood on that thread, I think, metaphorically speaking I mean. Also there's something so special about the thread as it is.

I've also noticed quite a lot of similarities - a lot of us were avid readers at 10 years old, and many of us were a year ahead of ourselves at school. I've been fascinated by every single word on that thread, and I feel like I have learned more about you all from there than from anything else I have read on ILX.

It's delightful and poignant and painful. And very moving. Someone had commented that they wanted to hug all of the sad 10-year-olds described in some of the posts, and I feel the same way.

You could be the Gonk?

http://www.blueharvest.net/images/gonk/gonk6.jpg

I clearly remember things like having soldiers search our house, my father being taken away for questioning, hiding someone at our place for 6 months till he could be smuggled out of the country, and some even more disturbing events.

Even so, when I think of my childhood what first comes to mind are very positive memories. That I can say that and even got the chance to be a kid is I think a testament to my parents strength and how hard they struggled to protect us. Thanks to this thread I called my mom earlier to say I love you and thanks for what you did. So CJ thanks, the thread really is wonderful, and you made my mum v. happy.

But on the other hand I'm really sad that as I go on reading I can recall many things abt my childhood: certain things my parents did for me for my birthday, that time where i acciddentaly broke my brtoher's finger. I have these fucking memories but I can't recall whether I did these things at 10 or 11 or 8/9. I just can't.

Reading through many of the entries it just struck what good memories you people have and what fine writers all of you are.

But Jody no! I mean, I can't even tell you how much literal sobbing I did while reading that thread (and I do have all kinds of mixed feelings about having kids) but it's not like I regret being born, or like I think my childhood was so awful that it wasn't worth what I've got now! Even though the ten-year-old me is a happy camper compared to fourteen-year-old me, which is where things start to get really knotty.

I don't know; I remain romantically convinced that all the suffering we do eventually works to our benefit. I am kinda stupid that way but it works for me :)

I just wish that "character" wasn't always inextricably linked with "suffering"; I mean, I've got things that make me cool and interesting, but I know how much of that is a reaction to growing up around painful situations and stupid people. And the pain HASN'T gone away, even though it's shaped my personality and provided me with endless creative fodder. So I wonder whether I'd be happier if I were just some dolt with a pleasant childhood.

(More seriously -- whatever creativity I have doesn't entirely come from pain and questioning, a fair amount comes from celebration and amusement. Part of my upbringing as well? I'd guess so...)

One odd point: CJ has consistently shown a deep interest in ILXers as people (rather than brains and repositories of info and so on), and this isn't the first time (though it may be the best) that she's found ways to address and examine that in interesting style. It therefore seems slightly sad that we've not met her at all - have you met any ILXers, CJ? Do you ever get to London?

I am saddened by the fact so many of you had such rough childhoods, but it gives me great hope for the whole of humanity that you have managed to live through it all, to be survivors. I mentioned this to some other people beforehand, but I do think each one of you is a living example of what my God has taught all of us to do, i.e. to shine our light high for the whole world to see. I'm sorry if this seems like I'm proselytizing here, but I do have to say that I feel all of you ILX regulars and semi-regulars are fulfilling the duties that God has meant for each of us to do.

By enabling me to share in your stories, I have become angry at your injustices, happy at your successes, saddened by your tragedies, and have gotten to know you so much better than I've ever gotten to know most anyone IRL. I can only pray that your open sores can heal and you all have soft places to fall in the future.

*big nurturing hugs*

I also disagree that suffering and character are always linked. Suffering can be detrimental to character; depression, self-obsession and narcissism easily develop when no-one else has a person's best interests at heart and they have to look out for themselves all the time.

I feel a bit bad about posting on that other thread. I felt sombre all day yesterday when really I'm quite a jolly old soul nowadays. (I don't pull my hair out, or bite my fingers anymore, though I do have raggy cuticles. And I've been sober for a long time.)

I liked reading everyone else's stories very much.

And then I rocked and went all gay!

This, from Suzy's contribution, is the funniest thing in the whole thread for me, so far:

'Gross!' comes the chorus from the back seat, then a guilty intake of breath: we're not allowed to say 'gross' because that's our neighbour's last name.

Amateurist--It wasn't that hard to remember. 10 was sort of a pivotal year, emotionally. The year I started to feel alienated, whoopie! Also, it helped to recall what was popular in music and movies and TV in '71/'72.

There were also some things I remembered later, and some things I left out which were memorable for me but not really interesting (or it would have taken some work to make them come off as interesting) such as when, during a particularly clumsy moment of latchkey kid roughhousing, my brother and I (mostly me as I recall) knocked into a cabinet and broke a Lladro statuette of a nurse; my mother was a nurse) that my soon-to-be stepfather had gotten her in Spain (I guess); anyway, the point is that we broke it, and my mother was far, far more upset -- she was angry, but she was mostly very sad -- about the whole thing. It was, I guess, the one nice thing she owned, and -- well, thinking back on it I'm sure it was probably a bad day and things in general were very difficult for her as a single mother whose own mother had lung cancer -- but yes. She was very sad. And I was surprised by her sadness and what could I do about it? I hadn't even realized the statuette meant so much to her.

The interesting thing about this exercise is that it always feels like you have about two more paragraphs in me. And then you write those two paragrahs, and it still feels like you have two paragraphs before you've exhausted your supply of anecdotes.

This thread brought back memories I thought I had forgotten. Memory is wierd. It haunts me.

just emailed my parents asking them to describe 10 yr old me. might trigger something.

I *hate* saying this b/c it seems like I wish sour grapes on everyone who has plesant childhood memories. This is not the case. I'm glad for everyone who can think back to their 10th year and feel warm. Their memories are just so painful b/c it brings to mind my own that I don't know how to deal with it. I *wish* to fucking death that I could.

However my ten year old self is nothing but a goddamn downer to everyone, least of all me. So over all FUCKING DUD.

I suck. You don't need to remind me of this.

heh, x-post.

there was that oliver sacks article about an elderly woman with a tumor that was pushing down on part of her brain that was causing her to have these vivid visions of a 5 year old self with her mother (a figure she was separated from in early childhood and had no previous rememberance of). from what the doctors could ascertain, they seemed to be recollections of actual events, not hallucinations/fantasties. they did clinical tests where they used electricity to stimulate those same areas of the brain and the one doctor guy came to the conclusion that our whole life, complete with every attendant emotional reaction we've ever had, is stored up there in perfect detail. hmmm. dunno if that's shaky science but hmmm anyway.

I just wanted to say that I hope you realise that none of that stuff your Dad did to you when you were a kid was your fault.

(off topic a bit : I have always wondered, when I see your name 'That Girl' if your real name is Marlo?)

ha ha, no. I'm just that girl. ;)

Editing is just something writers do as they go along. The strange thing about being 10 is that's when most of us on the thread began to work out that adults could be wrong about things, and prone to lashing out or covering these things up as they deemed necessary. And when one is prone to approaching the authoritative only to say 'b-b-but you're WRONG!' to them, to show the stirrings of some kind of non-compliance, they don't much like it, and often don't know what to do with kids like that.

Or have they figured it out? One thing that does shock me is that past a certain point in time (say, people who were 10 after 1985 or so) a lot of people here talk about ALREADY being on prescription drugs for things like ADD, which frightens the life out of me. They also appear to be quarantined indoors. When I was a little kid, maybe one kid in my grade was called 'hyper' and had a reputation for going completely apeshit in class. Now it seems like there are classrooms full of these kids. Why? Is it a lack of outlets for all that energy? My parents had to drag us indoors every night, dirty and exhausted from playing Capture the Flag (or, ahem, 'smear the queer', as our gym teacher called it at the time) or building forts in the marsh grasses or woods nearby. I'm sure we would have been called hyper and shot full of drugs if we were inside, climbing the walls of a claustrophobic house with no escape from fighting parents on the inside and your parents' choice of bogey-man outside.

it's big, as you can see: it was part of a charity dedicated to environmental education and the staff — including mum and dad — were live in: he ran the teaching side, she (unpaid) ran the domestic side (= cleaning, cooking, finances): every week in term time a new bunch of 30-60 students (aged 13-mature, it varied) would arrive for course in geology, freshwater biology, ecology, etc etc... sometimes someone you made friends with would come back the following year

it's right out in the country: not quite laurie lee somnolent, but not so very far from it in 1970: looking back on it, talking abt it with my mom, we wonder if it didn't work as its own better sixties, a becalmed quarantined idyll of idealistic community (sdhe has a litany of young folks who worked there and loved it, who went on to marriages that failed, jobs that were humdrum... )

the entire time feels totally wrapped in a gold glow for me: as tots, becky and i were the little emperor-buddhas of the place, able to go anywehere and be adored and fussed over — the cooking/cleaning staff were bulked out, year on year, by what were always known as the "norwegian girls", three or four tall blonde aryan-gorgeous women in their late teens or early twenties, over from norway to learn english, who'd nanny and babysit becky and me when necessary, as mothered by a four foot tall bossy, crabby, , funny, affectionate woman called maureen, as implacable as the czar of all the russias...

anyway, by age ten, this blessed era was palpably closing: i was in my second year at a little semi-local feed-school for the Great English Public School System — i would have been in my last year at the local primary school, and had been desolate at the time that i had left behind all my friends from nearby (not that nearby — no children that i knew well lived closer than three miles away over fields and busy roads)... being utterly pragmatic on the surface i adapt and fit in, but underneath this sparks a longish teenage alienation from, firstly, my sister (who is younger and still at the primary school) (and will stay in the state system and therefore not leave the school early), but secondly, on the whole, from the people i am at school with => i already associate being well-off with being cut-off and inwardly nurture the fact that most of the families of the boys i know are a lot better off than my mum and dad

but intellectually i enjoy the school, definitely: i have a june birthday, which means it makes sense to skip a year and be youngest in the class, because i'm good at maths (very well taught at my village school); we walk around self-important or self-conscious in our little grey uniforms (splashes of colour = black-and-yellow tie, yellow sock-tops), and mum is already helping me cultivate subtle borderline-rulebreaking differences => i have the longest hair in the school (ie not terribly, but it licks my collar) and the geography teacher (who has a waspish humour and who i like: a few years later he will be kicked out for groping one of the prettier boys) calls me "el beatle"; also after a few weeks of torment trying to wear "proper" uniform shoes (black lace-ups), i get medical dispensation for wide feet and wear sandals (to this day i don't really like shoes and wd go barefoot all the time if it were possible in london)

my best friend at this place is also called mark: years later he will sell me my first (and to date only) electric guitar => his parents are quaker and he is mordantly disrespectul of everything, which i like lots. like me, he is a dayboy — dayboys are in a minority at the school, many of whom are nato children, sent from british forces overseas... if i am gifted in maths and writing, i am also incurably lazy, and create endless exasperation in teachers who want more of me but don't get it: later a latin teacher will say "he sees light where others don't", which sounds great but i thin pretty much means to imply "but he misses really obvious stuff everyone else sees" => this pattern is already very set in 10-yr-old me

i am quite uninvolved in television or pop. i eat sweets if someone gives me some or buys me some: i never buy them for myself, or think to do so. what i do is read, all the time, and reread: when i invite friends round to play (a big operation, they have to be fetched or delivered by car), they get to do stuff with my lego or my toy soldiers or my marble run or whatever, while i lie on my bed and read. i go and see the aristocats and come back and complain that they projected it all blurry: after swift eye-tests, i start to wear glasses (i am tremendously pleased by this development)

at some point here my father starts reading lord of the rings to me: his plan is to read it all — he's been waiting all his life for this, it's one of the main reasons he had a son!! — but after a few chapters i get impatient and ask mum if she'll ask dad if i can read itg myself... dad says yes, his heart kind of broken (i apologised as best i could to him for this unintended act of infant cruelty last year: he was as stoically gracious about it as he always is, about everything)

the shadow over this whole time is this: my father's illness and death... which of course seems an odd thing to say when he is still living today, 33 years later, but sometime round now, becky and i learn that he is in the early stages of parkinson's disease (his beautiful cursive handwriting — learnt from reading tolkien as a teenager!! — is become jagged and shaky, and the following year he will start to teach himself to write with the other hand). l-dopa has only just been synthesised: it is not yet established as a treatment => it is considered unlikely that he live more than seven or eight years. mum and dad are dealing with this fact: i do not recall a single moment of grief or anger or hurt or confusion or whatever spilling over from them into our lives... or ever talking about it becky then

what i seem to have done is simply locked away my own fear and anger, at the looming awful loss, and decided — from round about now — that i will stop wanting things: things i want are taken away, so i will simply deal with what happens, make the most of it... my sense of dreamy estrangement and sleepwalking disconnection from my immediate surroundings, of exile, settles in for the duration

for a surprisingly long time this works pretty well: the emotional crisis doesn't come, in fact, until i myself reach more or less the age my dad was when he was first diagnosed

But nice things happened when I was ten too, my dog and my brother. I kind of rode it out, much as I have done every year since.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread. No sympathies offered, as I hope no-one has posted for that, but a lot of you are being prayed for and thought of.

I haven't met any of you (yet) Martin, though I do hope to at some point. I have a ludicrously manic life - both personally and professionally - that makes it hard to fit very much extra in right now. I can't even remember the last time I was in London (possibly a day Christmas shopping in 2001) despite the fact I'm only an hour and a half away.

One of the reasons I like posting on ILX (and AAD) so much is that it's something which slots in easily between the many demands on my time. I can just run in, punch someone proverbially on the arm and then run away again giggling. I like that. This place is like my playground.

I have always been genuinely fascinated by people and their lives/experiences. I love to hear people's stories and the 10-year-old thread (amongst other things I have read here on ILX over the past year) has totally blown me away. Your mentioning it as being an 'odd point' that I have started some getting-to-know-you threads has made me feel all awkward and embarrassed now, though perhaps I am too sensitive for my own good because I don't think you really meant it as any sort of criticism (did you?)

Anyhow, I'd like to reiterate what others have said about how powerful and emotional that thread has been. I've been very moved by what I've read, and wanted to thank everyone for sharing some of their memories so openly :)

goddamn

those two lines needed to be a narrative, but i couldnt do it. and it was the first step away from god, and to god, and away from my father.

i need a hug.

Di, I'm just really glad that Sam made a contribution to the thread!

My 'edit' facility is just there telling me not to lead a reader off on a tangent that will make it difficult to return to the main points I want to put across; it's not there as a kind of censor. A lot of shitty things happened to me as a kid; nothing as invasive as child abuse, mind, but certainly enough in the 'I have been violated as a person, by some arsehole' category. Writing is how some people fight back.

I know what suzy means, my story hits a tangent then continues like nothing happened, but one of the side effects of the story is that I've very rarely had to write an essay, and so I can't.

Looked at my old diary after going home last night. It starts on my 11th birthday, but confirms that most of what I did was fairly normal: interact with sisters, watch TV. Though I did start writing my diary in Runic for a couple of months.

When I worked in a grocery store in high school I would look at people's groceries and wonder about the cupboards they would go home to. What happened in these people's houses. What their lives were like.

This thread is kind of like thinking along those lines. .. and finding out the answers.

PS: this means I love all of you.

she certainly won't let me look after the classroom axolotyls over the summer holidays (a prize that we all sought furiously).

You're not the only one, J0hn. I don't even think the statement necessarily needs any kind of qualification. "I remain romantically convinced" is pretty sufficient, no?