Life moves in phases.

First, there was my dreamy kid phase:

Life was small, warm and woolly, and I kicked my feet carelessly, lost in colouring. Unquestioning, and happy on my own. My parents and grandparents love me.

My Aware kid phase:

Grown-ups contradict sometimes. Life starts to have complicated, scary moments. Some adults are loving and dependable, and some are unreliable or to be avoided. The world has scariness jammed into its dark corners. I learn to be more careful. I seem most informed by television or old wives tales told around the kitchen table. Alcohol seems mysterious and dangerous.

My Pre-teen and Teen phase:

Hormones, sex, power, and escapism are at the centre of my life. Home life is dramatic and full of high emotions. Grown up failings are rendered in stark relief against the backdrop of an apathetic, distracted world. Part of me wishes to be the dreamy kid again. The other part wants to just escape somehow. I start to feel like I’m losing at life, and so are my parents. Family has started unravelling by now. Feeling lost and abandoned sometimes, and lonely or a loner most of the time. I am most informed by male power fantasies in comic books and movies, and keenly aware that I don’t quite fit any of their templates. Alcohol is behind most of my family’s problems. Mother almost kills herself with alcohol poisoning, and gets brain damaged and institutionalized. I understand more about how people get lost in sadness and depression, and how they can just give up wanting to live. I witness the fragility of the mind. The main grownups in my life are sad and stripped of their parental dignity and persuasiveness. My parent’s marriage relationship is on the rocks.

My Young Adult, pre-Career phase:

With both parents in institutional care of some kind, I’m more or less on my own in life, moving at full sail now to chart a promising personal course. I’ve begun learning to make my own way in the world, starting to shed the ballast of my past and to picture some possible futures. Art reveals philosophies to me and leads me to readings in psychology, science, and technology. I accept myself, I like myself, and I see my future beginning to form. Some adults are still idiots or flying by the seat of their pants. I find wisdom wherever I can, and enjoy meeting teachers who will inspire me for decades to come. I see myself as a good, ethical, and positive adult. I meet the woman who becomes my best friend in life, and I become part of her family. I start living with her and learning to soften, share, and co-operate with a life partner. I can manage my use of alcohol and drugs, and I find that I don’t use them much at all. I graduate art college a few months before getting married. My Dad, sister, fiancee, and friends see me graduate from art school and a few months after that, my Dad dies. I still carry needless guilt, anxiety, and attachments from the past, but I slowly begin to let go of them

My Grown-up Career Phase:

I have fully started on my working life, doing challenging creative or technical work that means something to me, pays well enough to save, and is personally satisfying. I am my own man, but with my own baggage: my nature seems to pull me towards small startup companies that struggle for a few years and then fail. I learn to prosper in small, dysfunctional corporate families, to build my resume and portfolio, to write a good story about myself, and to do robust job searches.

I learn to trust my abilities and believe I can find another job when I need to. I unknowingly suppress a lot of my past family issues, mistakenly believing that I am working from a new, clean slate. I verge on obsession or workaholism sometimes, or I need to be the fixer or helper a lot of the time.

My mother’s death inspires me to begin documenting my family memories and history. I start an interest in genealogy and feel like I have my own personal stories that are worth telling and preserving.

My Middle-Age Clarity Phase:

I learn more about how much my early upbringing affected my ability to handle my emotions. I learn about separation anxiety, attachment theory, and the limbic system, and write a lot of journal entries and bad poetry. A loved-one’s suicide attempt, family deaths (brother, brother-in-law, father-in-law) and my wife’s stroke all hammer home the fragility of life. I truly begin to accept death, mourning, and suffering as just a natural part of life. I mistake some work acquaintances as full friends, and I learn to understand how to check my own reactions and expectations.

I realize how much I’ve starved for motherly tenderness in my life. I discard a couple of people, friends, or family, whom I’ve come to think of as toxic to me. I learn to understand friendship in a more philosophical, more healthy, and less attached way.

I learn more about sexual abuse committed in my family by male parents, and I reevaluate who my heroes were and should be. I develop a better relationship with my sister. Now in our middle-age, we talk every week.

I enjoy what seems like true job security for over 10 years, for the first time in my life.

I look forward to revisiting my dreamy kid phase from time to time, and maybe colouring quietly, on a rainy day.