Inside the Lines – How life pulled a fast one on me

"they love to tell you… stay inside the lines…

But something’s waiting… on the other side…”

John Mayer, No Such thing 

If my childhood were a person, a real-live human being like me, with arms and legs and dandruff… I don’t think we’d be on very good terms. We’d hide our contempt behind superficiality and polite smiles while secretly harboring the urge to sabotage every small chance of happiness in each others’ lives.

At most, I guess, we’d be face-book friends. But that’s about it.

Why? Because my childhood has sabotaged every small chance of happiness in my life.

(This is where the Americans dramatically say – “Period!”)

My childhood won a lot of 1^st prizes. But it’s the 2^nd prizes that can really change you.

One such 2^nd prize was awarded for colouring. You know the standard colouring competition – they give you an outline of some trees and hills and kids with kites and you have to fill in the shapes with colour. Easy enough right? Even a child can do it right? Wrong!

(This is where Americans insert the annoying buzzer sound)

The reason I won 2^nd and not 1^st was because in my enthusiasm, I’d strayed outside the lines (tsk tsk…). I’d then gone ahead and done the unforgivable - make new outlines around the careless scrawling to make it seem like that’s the shape things were meant to be in the first place (tsk tsk tsk…).

So my trees were thicker and greener, my mountains were rockier and browner and the kites were wild and enormous. Unwittingly, I’d given the picture some character. Wrong! Wrong!! Oh so wrong!!!

If only I’d stuck to the script, that damned 1^st prize would have been mine. 

This is how 2^nd prizes change your life.  

So I proceeded to follow the script and as expected - the 1^st prizes followed. Whenever the crayon threatened to breach the sacrosanct boundaries the prospect of a 1^st prize was like a Starship Enterprise type tractor beam pulling it back in.

But you know the funny thing about tractor beams? You get used to being reigned in. And even when they’re switched off you rarely go outside the lines.

And there’s a funny thing about lines. You forget what to do when there aren’t any. So you just make them up.

Then, if you’re lucky, you’ll get really really fucked in the head (tsk tsk tsk tsk… chhee). Because you realize that there are no lines and no tractor beams and the only reason they exist is because you ‘made them up’. Tragically, if you’re like me, you’ll just be angry and resentful and fail to see the beauty of how your life is composed entirely of tractor beams and lines and boundaries – that don’t exist. You’ll fail to appreciate the magical abilities of your own mind in having created this world of illusions.

You’ll take the immature approach… and blame your parents… or something like that.

If the angry and resentful me met the littler version of me I bet I’d say –

“listen - at first things will be really bad, but you won’t know it – you’ll wet your pants in kindergarten and pretend like it never happened and congratulate yourself for being a grown-up, you’ll reign in the crayons and paints and colour the picture the way you were given it and congratulate yourself for winning everyone’s approval, you’ll do the right things ask the right questions and make the right choices and feel good about being right. And those who are wrong don’t matter. Because they’re wrong”

“then things will stay just as bad, only it actually starts to feel bad, because you know just how bad things are – you’ll see the questions you didn’t ask because you didn’t think they were relevant, the times you didn’t ask for help because you didn’t want to be an inconvenience or worse, seem weak. You see the chances you didn’t take because – who invites uncertainty right? The rewards you didn’t win because you didn’t think you deserved them. And then you start to get uncomfortable… really really uncomfortable… and wonder why.”

If that is in fact what I end up saying, I really hope this is how I end –

“but eventually, you run out of ‘whys’ and things get a little better… or at least stop getting worse. Because you KNOW and strangely, simply knowing can help.”

*

To my good friends – anger and resentment. I’m glad they came. Between the three of us, I’m sure we’ll locate the whereabouts of the button that turns the tractor beam off. And enough erasers to wipe out the lines.

*

"I just found out there's no such thing as the real world...

Just a lie you've got to rise above"

John Mayer, No Such thing