Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Link to original post: [drupal=3468]Looking Into The Tiger's Eye[/drupal]
My trip back to Cape Girardeau today started bold enough. I didn’t shave this morning, I didn’t put on deodorant, I didn’t put on shoes, and I had a tiger in the passenger seat. This was a particularly meaningful occasion for more reasons than it being one of the rare times I don’t travel back to Cape by myself. The tiger’s name is Rajah and he is a stuffed tiger cub that I have had since I was three years old. I didn’t think I was ever going to take him to college because I wanted him to stay home. I wanted to keep anything sentimental from my childhood at home and slowly but surely move away from them. The largest reason why is something I kept secret for years and let it slowly eat away at me from the inside because I was too scared and stubborn to seek help.
In 1996, I was molested and near sodomized by someone who was roughly my sister’s age and had Asperser’s syndrome. Needless to say, this caused a lot of emotional and psychological problems in the following 11 ½ years and caused me to act hateful and inappropriate towards certain people. Despite happening nearly 14 years ago, I haven’t been able to talk about it to anyone in person besides one counselor until this year when I told my aunt, my best friend, and, yesterday, my mother. The last time I saw the guy who did it was about six years ago at his sister’s wedding and I finally brought myself to forgive him last year. It is something I’m near the end of putting behind me and this is part of this process.
For the longest time I agreed with Bill Watterson’s statement about not understanding people who were starry eyed nostalgic about childhood. I didn’t get people who said nothing bad about their childhoods and talked as if absolutely everything during those years was ideal and perfect. I resented them. I envied them. Even before 1996, most of my memories consist of me being afraid, alone, angry, confused, or depressed. There were good memories but I couldn’t get over the bad ones. I grew up with loving parents in a stable home but even that didn’t protect me from the various things that happened. Even when I was an enormous pessimist, I was dead determined to have a better adulthood than my childhood. There was a point where I honestly didn’t believe I’d live past the age of 25 but I felt like nothing could get worse than my childhood.
As I’m typing this, Rajah is looking at me with the same expression he’s always had. Aside from his glass eyes being slightly chipped, his whiskers being tangled, and small indent of fur on his back where I decided to give him a “haircut” before taking him to one of my friend’s house, he’s always looked the same. I basically did everything with him until I was about 8 and he seemed to fade further away from my attention with each passing year after I got Carney in 1997. Despite this, I never put him in a box or in the closet. If it was daytime, I stood him up on my bed and, at night, I made sure he was rested against a pillow or against Shere Khan, a large tiger that my Dad got me around the same time I got Rajah from my Mom. If I found him on the floor or trapped behind a pillow, I would promptly apologize and put him back in his rightful place. Even now that I’m just about done with college, I still find myself going into my room, giving him a hug, and catching him up on things that have happened as of late.
I will admit that I still retain some habits from my childhood. I’ll talk to animals, whether real or stuffed, like I would other people. Few things make me grin wider than wearing sneakers on a rainy day and then coming into a building and purposely squeaking my shoes as loud as possible. I still apologize when I bump into inanimate objects or almost step on a bug/spider. I still find myself bursting into song while I’m in the shower and purposely sound as dreadfully obnoxious as possible. I still like to yawn and scratch behind my ears like my cats even when if it ends up attracting attention. Halloween’s still my favorite holiday and I can still recite the songs from Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas. I still have no problem hugging my mother for as long as ten minutes. I will still rabble off random facts when I’m at the St. Louis Zoo like I did when Zoo Books were virtually the only thing I read. Maybe these all are evidence that I was able to find a decent amount of happiness in my childhood after all.
I recently saw Toy Story 3 and the main theme of the movie was growing up and knowing what to hold onto and what to let go of your childhood. As I said before, I wanted to start letting go of everything once I started college and it obviously didn’t work because it was so deeply entangled with who I had become. Bad memories have a tendency to dog you until they are resolved while good memories have a tendency to be underplayed and unappreciated. What do I appreciate about my childhood? My mom’s chili nearly every Halloween and my dad’s “eat feet time” whenever the mood struck him. Being lucky enough to see all the movies that made up Disney’s “Platinum Years” on the big screen. Going on field trips to Augusta Missouri and eating fresh apples in the fall. Having friends that laughed at my jokes and stories even if they were as asinine as my grandpa farting and destroying entire planets. Receiving a puppy on my 5th birthday and times I ate Shocktarts and Warheads until I lost all my sense of taste. Family vacations which usually ended up with me adding yet another stuffed animal to my ridiculously huge collection. Having two kittens that fell asleep on my forehead at night and Christmas mornings where I would wake up at 3am. Having a fierce sibling rivalry with my sister where we still defended each other when someone messed with the other. Going exploring in the woods around my Grandma’s house with my cousins. These things and many more are things that I should hold onto even as I get older.
If you follow my writings, you’ll notice that I talk about my past to the point of ad nauseum but I think I can now start focusing more on the present and the future. My childhood phobias have been dealt with individually, I have been able to come to terms with all the negative things that have happened in my life, and I have forgiven those that I feel that I have needed to forgive. As I'm wrapping this up, I’m just lying on my bed with Rajah nestled against my chest and feeling that I am completely at peace with my past for the first time. At the age of 22 ½, I have closure and I couldn’t be happier.
Fatmanonice, June 28th 2010
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The little reed, bending to the force of the wind, soon stood upright again when the storm had passed over.” –Aesop
“A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear it or see it.” –Michelangelo
My trip back to Cape Girardeau today started bold enough. I didn’t shave this morning, I didn’t put on deodorant, I didn’t put on shoes, and I had a tiger in the passenger seat. This was a particularly meaningful occasion for more reasons than it being one of the rare times I don’t travel back to Cape by myself. The tiger’s name is Rajah and he is a stuffed tiger cub that I have had since I was three years old. I didn’t think I was ever going to take him to college because I wanted him to stay home. I wanted to keep anything sentimental from my childhood at home and slowly but surely move away from them. The largest reason why is something I kept secret for years and let it slowly eat away at me from the inside because I was too scared and stubborn to seek help.
In 1996, I was molested and near sodomized by someone who was roughly my sister’s age and had Asperser’s syndrome. Needless to say, this caused a lot of emotional and psychological problems in the following 11 ½ years and caused me to act hateful and inappropriate towards certain people. Despite happening nearly 14 years ago, I haven’t been able to talk about it to anyone in person besides one counselor until this year when I told my aunt, my best friend, and, yesterday, my mother. The last time I saw the guy who did it was about six years ago at his sister’s wedding and I finally brought myself to forgive him last year. It is something I’m near the end of putting behind me and this is part of this process.
For the longest time I agreed with Bill Watterson’s statement about not understanding people who were starry eyed nostalgic about childhood. I didn’t get people who said nothing bad about their childhoods and talked as if absolutely everything during those years was ideal and perfect. I resented them. I envied them. Even before 1996, most of my memories consist of me being afraid, alone, angry, confused, or depressed. There were good memories but I couldn’t get over the bad ones. I grew up with loving parents in a stable home but even that didn’t protect me from the various things that happened. Even when I was an enormous pessimist, I was dead determined to have a better adulthood than my childhood. There was a point where I honestly didn’t believe I’d live past the age of 25 but I felt like nothing could get worse than my childhood.
As I’m typing this, Rajah is looking at me with the same expression he’s always had. Aside from his glass eyes being slightly chipped, his whiskers being tangled, and small indent of fur on his back where I decided to give him a “haircut” before taking him to one of my friend’s house, he’s always looked the same. I basically did everything with him until I was about 8 and he seemed to fade further away from my attention with each passing year after I got Carney in 1997. Despite this, I never put him in a box or in the closet. If it was daytime, I stood him up on my bed and, at night, I made sure he was rested against a pillow or against Shere Khan, a large tiger that my Dad got me around the same time I got Rajah from my Mom. If I found him on the floor or trapped behind a pillow, I would promptly apologize and put him back in his rightful place. Even now that I’m just about done with college, I still find myself going into my room, giving him a hug, and catching him up on things that have happened as of late.
I will admit that I still retain some habits from my childhood. I’ll talk to animals, whether real or stuffed, like I would other people. Few things make me grin wider than wearing sneakers on a rainy day and then coming into a building and purposely squeaking my shoes as loud as possible. I still apologize when I bump into inanimate objects or almost step on a bug/spider. I still find myself bursting into song while I’m in the shower and purposely sound as dreadfully obnoxious as possible. I still like to yawn and scratch behind my ears like my cats even when if it ends up attracting attention. Halloween’s still my favorite holiday and I can still recite the songs from Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas. I still have no problem hugging my mother for as long as ten minutes. I will still rabble off random facts when I’m at the St. Louis Zoo like I did when Zoo Books were virtually the only thing I read. Maybe these all are evidence that I was able to find a decent amount of happiness in my childhood after all.
I recently saw Toy Story 3 and the main theme of the movie was growing up and knowing what to hold onto and what to let go of your childhood. As I said before, I wanted to start letting go of everything once I started college and it obviously didn’t work because it was so deeply entangled with who I had become. Bad memories have a tendency to dog you until they are resolved while good memories have a tendency to be underplayed and unappreciated. What do I appreciate about my childhood? My mom’s chili nearly every Halloween and my dad’s “eat feet time” whenever the mood struck him. Being lucky enough to see all the movies that made up Disney’s “Platinum Years” on the big screen. Going on field trips to Augusta Missouri and eating fresh apples in the fall. Having friends that laughed at my jokes and stories even if they were as asinine as my grandpa farting and destroying entire planets. Receiving a puppy on my 5th birthday and times I ate Shocktarts and Warheads until I lost all my sense of taste. Family vacations which usually ended up with me adding yet another stuffed animal to my ridiculously huge collection. Having two kittens that fell asleep on my forehead at night and Christmas mornings where I would wake up at 3am. Having a fierce sibling rivalry with my sister where we still defended each other when someone messed with the other. Going exploring in the woods around my Grandma’s house with my cousins. These things and many more are things that I should hold onto even as I get older.
If you follow my writings, you’ll notice that I talk about my past to the point of ad nauseum but I think I can now start focusing more on the present and the future. My childhood phobias have been dealt with individually, I have been able to come to terms with all the negative things that have happened in my life, and I have forgiven those that I feel that I have needed to forgive. As I'm wrapping this up, I’m just lying on my bed with Rajah nestled against my chest and feeling that I am completely at peace with my past for the first time. At the age of 22 ½, I have closure and I couldn’t be happier.
Fatmanonice, June 28th 2010
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The little reed, bending to the force of the wind, soon stood upright again when the storm had passed over.” –Aesop
“A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear it or see it.” –Michelangelo
