As I’m hitting thirty in about six months, I’ve decided that the best course of action for my existential dread would be to frantically rush to hit the goals I set myself when I was twenty. One of which was to face and understand my traumas and how I came to be.
When I was around nine or ten years old, I remember vividly an experience that I think subdued my extroverted personality. I was fundraising for a club I was in at the local grocery store with a group of my peers and their parents. The club was Odyssey of the Mind, which was this competition that combined theatre and engineering for kids; we were fundraising for our trip to the national competition.
Most good traveling salesmen will tell you that the key to a good sale is right time, right place. As a kid selling cookies outside a store with better tasting, more reasonably priced, and higher quantity cookies, I quickly realized after an hour that I would need to rely on other methods.
I was not a cute kid: I was fundraising for a combined theatre and engineering competition, after all. So I relied on a boisterous performance, a friendly smile, and a little relentless badgering. Every passerby would get the same smiling pitch to help the cause, and after rejection, a friendly “Okay, Have a good Easter,” just as we were taught.
Well, after hundreds of the same, repeated spiel, that approach just happened to rub one guy the wrong way.
It was an older man - probably 40s - who was walking to the entrance of the Piggly Wiggly. Slightly bald, with square sunglasses covering his face, I gave him the spiel. He ignored me, and walked past. So it goes: “Okay. Have a good Easter.”
This stopped him. He turned around, and started walking towards me, finger pointing at me. “Who do you think you are?”
I was perplexed. I was ten, and have given this same sales pitch to hundreds with no reaction. Now suddenly, this man was towering over me, getting in my face --shouting at me, scolding me, berating me.
Who do you think you are? You can’t be going and harassing people. You’re terrible and stupid and your bullshit won’t make me buy shit from you. Don’t tell me to have a good Easter. Who do you think you are.
And then he walked away, into the store.
I don’t know what happened. After hundreds of rejections, maybe I was becoming frustrated and sarcastic. Maybe I relied on youthful guilt. Maybe I relied on religious guilt. I’ve searched my feelings and confronted it; I don’t think so. More likely, I think it was just an adult - just a guy - in the right place and the right time and a kid who said the right things to the right person.
I’ve gotten to a point where I understand that there is a lot that goes on in life; the heat increases on the kettle - in bills, in relationships, in the daily stressors and the dreams that drip away — and pressure builds and builds and builds. The steam has to go somewhere, somehow.
After that, the happy little salesperson who talked to every passerby was gone. I retreated into myself, no longer as confident. There was a shame to what I was doing. I would do it no longer. I would avoid this feeling. I feel it still, when approaching strangers, asking for help, and sticking up for myself. It’s a feeling I need to constantly overcome.
Yet what draws me to this moment is not the loss of what I once was, nor is it trying to find past blame for all those future moments. I think what I find from this moment is a sadness that no one stood up for me. There were other parents present. There were other adults around. But the man walked away, into the store.
Te ipsum adspice
