High anxiety
A painful teenage moment need happen only once, but it can haunt you for a lifetime.
It was one of three old photographs of myself my family had dragged out. Although a number of years seperated the pictures, I was wearing the same school uniform in all of them, which gave them an unnerving unity. In the first one I was about eight and was smiling straight into the camera I looked so happy, I found it hard to recognise myself. The same face beamed from the next photo taken three years later. Then there was the third photograph, the one when I was around 12, the one that instantly made everyone laugh. In between the giggling fits someone managed to spit out: "What on earth happened?"
It was undeniable that something had changed in those few years. It was more than bad lighting and a poor subject - my entire demeanour had altered: my eyes were downcast, the heavy metal spectacles I wore appeared to cut into my nose, my mouth had curled into a sneer, my hair had darkened to a lank mop. I had become "the thing".
As my family pointed and laughed I remembered what it was like to be 13 (because that seemed to happen a lot when I was 13). And I knew something they didn't: the way I look in that photograph is the way I see myself today.
That version of me - the thin-lipped myopic monster, the human toad, the creature from the back of the room - is the one I cannot erase. It's installed in my visual memory and no amount of "you-beaut-feel-good positivity" can dislodge it. We can spend a lifetime trying to escape those awkward adolescent moments but they lurk in the subconscious until conditions are right for them to return.
For me it lifts itself out of my psyche like a teenage Mr Hyde running quietly amok in my life. I'll be at a dinner party and there, sitting in my seat, is that gangly, acne-ridden, mouse-haired invertebrate. I wonder why the other guests have said nothing. I wonder how long I can get away with it before someone throws me out. I feel like a great pretender waiting nervously to be uncovered. My outward appearance has not changed but inwardly I am 13 again and I find myself picking the scab off an emotional scar. I find I am too frightened to speak, nervous and embarrased, and any confidence I have had evaporated. I tell myself: it doesn't matter what's outside, it's what's inside that counts. And what's inside is a throwback, a mutation, a stunted nondescript. Then, as mysteriously as it appeared, "the thing" has gone.
The only saving grace is I'm not alone. There are some of us out there who have magnified one second of weakness for the duration of our lives: the girl who tucked her skirt into her undies, the boy who wet his pants just before the bell went, the slowest, the shortest. It could relate to a piece of jewellery, a pair of shoes, a shameful incident - and it waits to be reborn.
Do people in positions of power confront these demons or are they forced to live with them as well? Does Clinton picture himself as a clumsy, sexually illiterate youth when he speaks to Congress? Does Tony Blair recall miming to Beatles songs with a hairbrush in his bedroom? Do their alter-egos ever rise up in moments of crisis and "go the spoil"? Is there any way of overcoming this stumbling block?
I tried for a while to replace the negative image with a positive one but nothing worked. I looked for things I could be proud of, I searched for any triumph or success, perhaps if I had won something, achieved something. It was a useless exercise - nothing I compared it to had the same power. I had to concede the weakness was victorious.
I can see the boundaries of my life, my limitations, the structures that enclose and surround me as clearly as the border of that photograph. As my mother slipped the photo in a frame and placed it on her sideboard, I couldn't help but feel he had won again. Even as I write he has been here. Crouching at my shoulder, whispering in my ear, grateful that I have given him shape.
By Paul McDermott, appeared in Sunday Life! (the Sun Herald supplement) Jun 14 1998
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Dumbing up (7/6/98) |
High anxiety (14/6/98) |
Disclaimer: This article was written by Paul McDermott and remains the property of the Sun Herald (Australia)