Well not entirely. If you some of you know me just through reading this you might get the notion that I might be more mature than I really am. Believe me I have plenty of witnesses that can tell you all about how goofy I can be even now halfway into my forties.
A very wise person and brilliant writer named Travis Heerman once wrote a piece and performed it where he read notes he wanted to send back to his past self. It was amazing, acknowledging mistakes he made that he could now rack up to not knowing any better at the time. I really respected him for laying himself bare like that for us to see.
It reminded me of all the stupid things you "learn" as a kid from the people around you. Mostly other kids, but let's be honest adults create the world children live in.
I grew up during a rather barbaric era in country's culture. Called the late 70's and early 80's. We had kind of sorted out issues of race by then, but you could still hear kids making nigger jokes whnever they thought they could get away with it. And as I went to primarily white schools as a kid they kind of did it a lot.
Thankfully my parents took a dim view of that sort of thing and discouraged me from picking it up.
Keep in mind that period wasn't exactly kind to the LGBT community. Which was either kept out of the public spotlight or were portrayed as deviants and weirdo's by and large. So to my mind as a high schooler anyone in that group were a bunch of "fags".
The fact that I liked seeing two women making out in magazines and films however did not strike me as ironic at all. Let's be honest we're kind of confusing in our attitudes in those things.
Anyway all that changed when a good friend of mine came out to me not long after my first and not exactly successful attempt at college. Now by the standards we had back then I should have just shunned him and moved on.
On the other hand. For about three years from fifth through seventh grade I was the weird kid who got picked on and bullied all the time. I still have a hard time looking back on that period as it was just one long exercise in isolation. So after that when I started making friends they were really important to me. The notion of actual human contact and being in a crowd of people who got you was refreshing and revitalizing to say the least.
This guy had helped me out in the past, looked after me when i was being a drunken fool, which back then was way too common of an occurrence.
So rather than viewing it through the lens of the lessons I had been "taught" by my peers I saw it through the lens of someone who had been pretty damn good to me. At that moment the notion of looking down on someone because of their sexuality became a moot point.
I kind of think of it as me starting off on the path to the dreaded "M" word. Maturity. Which if I were to be honest usually involves unlearning all the old false hoods you've picked up socially through the years, and learning to overcome a fairly long self possessed streak in my own mind. Looking back on it I kind of mentally groan when I think of my behaviour in the past and am really grateful I got out from under a lot of it.
I do kind of shudder at the notion of how I would be if I held onto a lot of those things, and the incredible amazing people I know now who would not be part of my life if I had just gone with the flow.
There's still plenty of room for work on it, but I do enjoy trying. It gives me the room to learn something new, or to at least listen to view points I had not considered in the past.
Long story short it made my world a much larger place, and a much bigger playground for me to romp in when I'm done working. Growing up doesn't mean you forget how to play, it means learning how to play better with others. In the end I find that makes it a lot more fun.
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