#96 Out Of Control Outsider (Beginning of new story)

When did I start losing control? I think it all started when I began to wonder if I had control of anything at all. I decided that it all could fit together, all the pieces of my life as kid. The pieces inside my head like a jigsaw puzzle without a rubric of consciousness or awareness. Then rules became a “thing”; Right, wrong, bad, good, pretty, ugly, smart, dumb, funny, tragic.  Binaries started to pervade my little life and pushed me around my childhood playpen until it broke open. The playpen became an open field with no boundaries or edges to contain my feelings, which were adolescent fierce and powerful. Maybe it began in 1972 when my family moved for the first time. I was in fifth grade and it sucked. Yet, I made friends after I freaked out over leaving New Jersey. Herbert Hoover Elementary School in Harrisburg, PA.was more diverse than Walter Stillman Elementary in Tenafly, NJ. It was ok moving into a giant brand new house with balconies and uninhabited fields on all sides of our property. I wandered around alone, next to a babbling brook and various sites where more houses were under construction in the subdivision. Dug up trenches, pipes to crawl through, wheat fields with dirt bike paths engraved and flattened to follow without any idea where they led. I walked and wandered.

When my kid started middle school in the city, I couldn’t compare what my life was to hers. No fields, paths, pipes or places to be completely alone. No strange transitions from school to school with new kids. Middle school funneled the old elementary kids and new kids into a giant building on 76^th Street. She fit into her classes, well, good enough. No tantrums set off by feeling uprooted and displaced by her parents. Yet, I cannot detach from my teen years. They are in my bones, my dreams and fears. I don’t want to lay them onto her, but the haunting remnants of shards of glass, dirty sidewalks and misfits lurk. I always spot the misfits and see myself in them.  Identifying pieces missing are my way of looking to become complete. It isn’t possible, but maybe that’s where this story began when it was, in fact, the recognition that things were not in my control. I've heard that adolescence is a time when abstract thinking becomes possible. Perhaps, it is the advent of this that also makes questioning becomes interminable and, well, impossible.

Everywhere I looks are triggers which lead me down paths of exploration and instead of discovering something the definitive, I find the infinite: no control.