Though it had been a couple months since he saw the home video, it still bothered him. He knew what he was like as a child, but to see it visually reflected back at him made it feel more real and affirmed beliefs he had about himself. Though, maybe he opportunistically used it as a means of affirmation of his already held negative beliefs about himself – he often considered this possibility. The possibility that he’d always been seeking evidence to allow him to wallow rather than seeking evidence to contradict his held beliefs to free of him from wallowing. Did he secretly love wallowing while outwardly expressing desire to change? These are the questions that kept him up at night.
The video wasn’t particularly remarkable, a dad using a bulky 90s video camera that resembled what you’d see a television cameraman use, filming his son, asking him benign questions (he remembered the camera well since him and his siblings would often create their own home videos with it and he once used it to film himself masturbating at the age of 14 which he quickly filmed over – something he’s never told anyone). What it was that bothered him was the demeanor of his seven year old self. He noticed how he was hiding his face, murmuring, eyes darting everywhere except straight ahead, body language turned inward, anxious, fearful. He could see it had been there awhile, even at seven, and was flourishing on fertile ground.
Of course he knew the presence of fear and anxiety arrived early in his life, heck he even considered it came about upon exiting his mother’s womb (he once picked up a book by psychoanalyst Otto Rank called The Trauma of Birth which turned out to be mostly nonsense, but he still sometimes entertains the basic premise). But seeing his seven year old self, afflicted, made him realize how much it was him and not something separate from him. Past, present, and future, he was and will be an anxious human being. He had been actively battling it since young adulthood when he realized how much it was preventing him from talking to girls – but these battles had been ones of consecutive losses. Seeing this video bothered him, because it elucidated that deep inside that boy and now this man, in the places that you can’t touch, there is fear and it hasn’t and isn’t going anywhere. It’s my master.
2 comments
Everyone was a child ounce, with defining moments, but don’t let that make you feel guilty either, take your time, afterall were only human
about a year ago i binge watched homemade footage of my childhood that my mom converted to discs from the vhs cassettes. i too tried to find a piece of evidence as to why i grew up to be like this.
i remember my dad being absent most of the time, caught up in work. he, on the other hand, disagrees with me. he says he was around. i wanted filmed evidence for his absence, but he was in most of the footage i found. that made me feel angry, like i’m crazy and there are no reasons for me to feel like i do. in my rage i threw all the discs on the floor and shattered them. i felt bad afterwards, as if i shattered my child self, the little innocence that was left in me.
i know there’s a reason i feel like i do about my dad. i know he was absent. it was mostly birthdays or holidays on those tapes, and i remember he was around then. there was barely any footage from weekdays, when he wasn’t around.