Another season passes by.

To preface, I hope this entry isn't perceived as me bitching about my childhood. If so, my apologies. The reason I say this is that I have no reason to complain about anything that happened while growing up. I've been blessed with two loving and supportive parents. I never faced any particular hardships growing up either. I just really want to talk about the period in my life (and most kids' lives, I'm sure) when they start to grow up. 

It seems to me that my years in 7th and 8th grade were a time in which I realized that the world didn't revolve around me, that narcissism and self-interest where no longer the havens of a maturing adolescent. It was when I started thinking of a world outside of myself. 

When I was a kid, I was fearless. Bulletproof. I didn't think anything could touch me. I recall one summer we were driving back from South Dakota and we stopped at some canyons in Utah. I nearly gave my mom a heart attack when I decided to walk along the very edge of the cliffs. I'd occasionally stop to peer into the canyon, the tips of my toes barely clinging to the earth. I'm sure I could have easily lost my balance and fell to a certain death, but it never occurred to me. I was invincible. 

I also had a tendency to drive my brother crazy because I expected him to cater to my every whim. If I wanted to wrestle, we were going to wrestle. If I wanted to go swimming, by golly it was going to happen. Our last summer in Arizona, my mom decided that being housewife was tiresome and got a job working at a clinic, meaning that my brother and I were left home unsupervised. I would antagonize him to no end, often leading to all day brawls. One time, I drove him so mad that he threatened to shoot himself in the hand with a bee bee gun. I called his bluff and sure enough, he spent the rest of the day going at the doctor's getting a bee bee dislodged from his palm. I was absolutely incorrigible.

Things started to change somewhat when I got to the 7th grade. For the first time, I started feeling lots of anxiety. At first, this anxiety was only problematic when I played baseball. Then it started becoming almost all encompassing. And I still don't know why. I suppose I could just chalk it up to getting older, to gaining a higher level of consciousness. Maybe it was the first time I really started asking questions about myself that I didn't know how to answer. For the first time, I really had to ponder on how I fit into my world, on what kind of person I was going to be. 

And I hated it. I still wanted to be the kid who thought he could do anything. And maybe I could have. I would just always find myself questioning everything, questioning my motives and worse of all, my abilities. I didn't know how to make sense of the world in front of me. 

Things were probably at their worst during the 8th grade. Kids in generally are especially cruel around 12 and 13, and I learned that the hard way. One day, I told one of my best friends that my mom suffered from Lupus, a disease that turns a person's immune system against themselves. I didn't think anything of it. Come the next day though, I had random people asking me how long my mom had been suffering from AIDS, if she was going to die soon. I was absolutely livid, so I confronted him about it. He offered no explanation. Apparently he had no motivation to do it at all. In fact, he was upset at me for getting angry with him. 

For the rest of that year, I didn't feel like I could trust anyone. My anxiety only got worse as the year progressed and I started feeling more alienated. I just wanted to be left alone. 

Thankfully the clouds cleared for the most part by the 9th grade. Day by day, I started to learn a bit more about myself, about my place in the world. The world finally started to make a bit more sense. 

To this day though, I still get snake bit by my anxiety. I still have a habit of questioning myself, and it can become absolutely paralyzing. There are still times when I feel like I did back in 8th grade, when I just want to escape. When I wish I had total control over my world. But if I learned anything from my adolescence, it's how unattainable that is.