a few days ago, a client, aged 13, told me that he could not wait until he was sixteen.

"Then", he said, "I can get my driver's license, quit school, and go wherever I want to."

Therein lies the innocence, naivety, dare I say ignorance, of youth. Knowing that a speech on the importance of an education, not to mention its connection with his plans on obtaining, let alone maintaining, something to use his driver's license with, would fall on deaf ears, I had only one thing to say.

I told this young, nescient, and indeed, potential future criminal (truth be told) merely not to wish his life away.

It was cliché, I know. Also it lacked the meaty substance my usual attempts at breaking ground burgeon with. This time it was pure garden salad sans dressing. Nevertheless, it was the only rebuttal I had the ambition to voice at that particular time.

I think it a common trait among adolescents to perform such ritual wishing away of the years. When I was his age, halfway through my first year of middle school, fat, geeky, and not overly popular, I was guilty of the same. My wishes were motivated further by dreams of emancipation from the hell that was my childhood and teen years. It seemed that eighteen was magical age that was a lifetime away. It would never happen. It held such mystical, omnipotent power that I would be destined to carry the trappings of social and familial slavery during an eternity of puberty. When I was not wishing my life away, I was crying out for an answer to why I was the victim of such cruel divine forces. Why was I fat? Why did I feel so alone? Why did I have parents that hated me? Why? WhY? WHY? If only I was eighteen, an adult, finished school, able to drive, then, and only then, would my life mean something. Then and only then would I be free. I would be free to choose my destiny. I would be free of the stares, the mocking, the oppression. I would be free to set my parents straight on a lifetime of verbal and emotional abuse. If only I was eighteen...

That was nineteen years ago.

I turned thirty-two ten days ago. This cursed event, along with my client's comment, forced me to take a long, hard look at life-after-eighteen.

I am still fat. I have not spoken to my mother in months. I still feel alone sometimes. And my familial oppressors have been replaced by socioeconomic ones in cognition, no, recognition, of the truth that lies behind our programmed purpose for existence.

I have had little success save survival, and great failure, as a husband, friend, contributor to society, child of the planet. I have become bitter, sarcastic, cynical, pessimistic, jaded. I have abandoned my potential, and buried my dreams.

Worst of all, in my post eighteen years, I have failed to learn to experience joy, pure joy, that is. Oh, I have attempted to entomb reality in a Paxil haze. I have chased those cheap fast highs that would allow me to forget, for twenty minutes or so. And to her credit, life with The Goddess has brought me closest thus far to experiencing that pure, unfiltered, all natural lust for life.

But always, in the cracks and crevasses of my consciousness, lays that bitter, jaded, sarcastic, cynical, pessimistic me that believed in only one thing...

...that life would be perfect after eighteen.

 

Be Well