Let's Take Time to Celebrate Life!!!!

Sixteen

Prompt: Tell us about the person you were when you were sixteen.

Sixteen was about forty four years ago. It is kind of hard to get back into the skin of one who was beginning to take on the identify of a loner and in a larger sense a drifter. I was a Sophomore in High School. I got to this fork in the road. If I went one way there was promise of popularity, friendship and intellectual prowess worthy of the respect of others. Not only that I was beginning to think I could be a pastor long before I ever committed to Church.

It was kind of a 9/11 experience for me that I do not know if I will ever recover from, when I was just beginning to think sixteen might be a cool age to be. My brother Kurt went into a catatonic. As soon as he was taken prisoner by mental illness, I knew I could not be far behind. Life is filled with choices and I am not sure I went down the right road, as I look back. It has been quite a ride. I believe being sixteen years old was needful so that I could be prepared for sixty. It was during that time that the family as I knew it was torn up and battered. Mom and dad were exposed rightly or wrongly as the progenitors of chaos. After all in those days mental illness tended to be the fault of parents and in my case I thought the whole thing was my fault. After all I could have treated him better. If I did he might have no reason to slip off into the world of Schizophrenia. This was the world of my sixteen year old brain. I have healed some and yet even after all that time I still feel panic when I hear an ambulance. I am probably the last person you want around if there is a major crisis.

With all that being said, I am glad for the choices that others made. I kind of left the human race for a while. I can relate to the world of the underground man, Dostoyevsky writes about. I suffered and wanted to be left alone and my way of arising out of my hole was in doing things that my brother might have done. For example I ran cross country. Up until then sports were not my thing. I played tennis, even if I had little confidence in my ability. It was my only outlet. Kurt had left and he was the one people longed to see compete in sports. Now to me he seemed to be a shell of who he was.

The painful part of the equation was that few watched me compete. I was not a main attraction kind of person and the sports I chose did not lend themselves to have much of a cheering section. I learned to get down and dirty with others like me. People who thought they were losers were one my team and I longer for the day we would be seen as people worthy of attention and adoration deserved,