I suppose the title of this post has different meanings to different people. From recent comments, it is used to describe the “post-truth” era that many seem to think we are in. To many, the hardest years are the ones that they are currently living in. Being a history guy I have a longer view than that. But this is not at all what this post is about. 🙂
These are the first words from a quote from Helen Hays shown below
I couldn’t agree more. At the tender age of ten, I had just taken up a Jack London book entitled “White Fang”. That was my first serious look at the world beyond my front door. It opened up a world I had never imagined. Due to circumstances, I was pretty mature for a ten-year-old. My narcissistic mother had just abandoned me, my younger brother, and my dad for greener pastures. I didn’t really know what was going on but imagined it was my fault. I knew my life was going to be quite different than it had been.
Between ten and seventy were episodes that challenged me. I struggled to pay my own way through college by working forty hours a week in addition to a near full course load. I knew my social skills were lacking but I never realized the extent until years later. I would become deaf at the age of forty and was laid off at the age of fifty-four. Thankfully I had saved enough money and had enough years of employment to earn a significant pension.
It was not until the age of seventy that I finally decided that my hardest years were behind me. Social status no longer meant anything if it ever did. I simply didn’t care what others thought of me. The age of seventy was indeed at the end of my hard years.
Thanks, Helen for helping me realize that fact.
Being a person with some strong Aspie traits, I just don’t handle stressful situations well. Fortunately, I don’t totally lose it as the word meltdown infers but I quit acting like an adult and instead am a panicked kid. In autism studies, these episodes are called meltdowns so I will call them that for the purposes of this post.
I think just about all of us can pretty quickly recall some of our worst times in our lives. For me, one of those times was the damage done to my wife when the small Evangelical congregation we belonged revoked my membership due to my failure to align with the belief that, among other things, the earth is only 6,000 year old and any seeming proof otherwise is just God trying to trick us. My wife, who was recuperating from cancer surgery, was devastated by the rejection but even more so by the sudden loss of so-called friends there. It would be the last time we ever had contact with most of them. The friendships that we thought were pretty deep ended up being very shallow!
Since I was a teenager in the 1960s, one of my favorite musical groups was Simon & Garfunkel. One of their most popular songs was “I am a Rock”. Due to my Aspie traits, I was somewhat of a loner back then so this song just “spoke” to me. My mother had abandoned me a few years before, so that probably had something to do with it too.
I have never been a person who patiently waits in a line. It has always seemed like a total waste to me. I will most often do anything to keep from having to stand behind other people. Now that I have taken the “One day at a time” approach to life, I want to live what I have left of life as fully as I can. Waiting in line is just not in that scenario. And as Will said in the quote above many things just aren’t worth the wait.