Well, hello, everyone. I was originally going to write about something a bit different – problem solving and Stoicism – but then I saw this prompt from the journaling app Day One and this feels a bit more meaningful:
What does it mean to be a kid at heart?
Truth be told, I have no idea, at least none that I’m aware of. I don’t think I was ever a child, really. In some ways, I didn’t really get to be a child, and in others, I chose not to be one, and in still others, simply…never was one. I was an odd kid who saw too much and asked far too many questions. I knew exactly what I wanted from a very young age, around three or four, and have spent my entire life to date working to get it, as the family and life I was born into was nothing like what I wanted.
I was ruthlessly self aware and extremely critical of myself and even more so of others. I could read by eighteen months old and speak like an adult, and like many AuDHD kids, I had no concept of shame or embarrassment. I was told to be honest and was punished for lying, so when I was asked for my opinion, I gave people my honest opinion fluently. This pissed a lot of people off because it turns out they weren’t looking for an honest opinion and weren’t expecting a well thought out, passionate critique from a toddler in front of everyone they knew.
So I grew up very afraid, confused, and angry. Why would people ask for my opinion and then get angry for me expressing my opinion?! This just pissed me off more, because as fluently as I could speak, I had no concept of social nuance or Southern politeness, and frankly I thought it was all bullshit. So I became a very lonely, angry kid. Nobody in my family expected me to know what I wanted, much less express it with ease and fluency, as they are very indecisive, so I was harshly punished for that, too. From the time I was perhaps five or six, my strongest desire was to be an adult so I could be an adult so I could finally leave all of those indecisive fuckers with their conflicting ideas about manners and the right thing to do in the dust, and I wasn’t shy about that, either. See why I have no idea what it even remotely means to be a kid at heart?
Though, I suppose, imagining for a moment that my family had been made up of decent human beings more in line with the spirit of the question, and not the reality of what happened, I think I could come up with a better answer.
Had my family let me lead the way and actually believed me when I said I knew precisely what I wanted (within reason, of course, with limits to keep me safe from harm), I could them allowing me to explore my myriad special interests and gently nudging me toward keeping an open mind to related areas, accepting me for who I was rather than who they were trying to shape me into, and celebrating my imagination rather than attempting to stifle it in the name of normalcy or propriety.
I wish that my family had accepted and encouraged me in my entirety that way. However, the tragic reality is that they didn’t. That being said, a lot of the work I’ve been doing of late is accepting myself like that. It still feels really weird a lot of the time because I’m so used to suppressing aspects of myself or expecting those around me to ask me to “tone it down”, but nobody does anymore. That in and of itself is terrifying in a way, but deeply and immensely liberating.
In the process, I’ve been able to release a lot of the anger I’ve been holding onto for 27 fucking years and replace it with curiosity, love, and something like wonder. I think this is more of what the prompt was driving at, and I like to think I’m living this.
I couldn’t have done this without my beloved Emerson modeling being a kid at heart for me more or less. He’s never lost that wonder or that curiosity. He’s fucking adorable, passionate about everything, and it’s infectious. Loving him and watching him get fully in touch with his inner childlike wonder has helped me discover mine in many ways for the first time consciously. He has to often drag me out of my shell because anxiety is a fucking bitch, but I’m grateful for it every time he does. He has been helping me gently unfurl a great deal. I call him “baby man” affectionately because of that never ending sense of wonder and youthful rambunctiousness.
Another partner of mine, Hawthorne, is another excellent model for this. They are essentially a tiny radiant goth crow baby darling in person form, and they are so fucking fascinated with so many different things with such great intensity that they cannot help get ME interested in a lot of the same shit effortlessly. In fact, I got started practicing magic in large part YEARS ago in earnest because of them. They opened my mind to so many different things simply by being so excited about them and I honestly don’t know what I would do without that sweet baby.
And as I sit with the eternal question of “what the fuck do I do now” I posed in my post the other day, I’m finding that a lot of my interests are holdovers from when I was fucking pissed at everything, most of myself, and wanting to drink myself into a stupor. I picked many of them up to spite someone or other and they became the sole buffer between oblivion and me with time. Very few of them actually spark any kind of real passion or breathe any kind of real life into me, they’re more like “hey, I’m gonna do this thing as a last resort so I don’t do something worse or permanent because I feel like utter dog shit”. In that way they feel more like a chemical dependency than a real passion. But one of the things I keep coming back to is audio engineering.
Songwriting is one of those chemical dependency things for me. It’s a great outlet when I feel like utter dog shit and have nowhere else to turn, hence why I have written 15 fucking albums. But it’s not the songwriting part of the process that lights me the fuck up. It’s the RECORDING portion. I love recording. It’s something that I love doing so much that even though I’ve produced and recorded fifteen fucking albums on my own, that part of the process never gets old and I love approaching it from different angles every time, trying to do it differently and better with the supplies I have on hand.
Now, I’m someone who gets very bored very easily with things once I know how to do them. I want to move on, chart new territory once I’ve mastered something to my satisfaction. But no. Never with recording and engineering, and it’s been just about fifteen years since I first set foot in a professional recording studio in Dallas. My passion for it pales in comparison to even performing live, which is why I don’t really perform live or promote my music that often. I just really don’t enjoy songwriting or performing that much beyond a last resort outlet. As I heal, I find I would far rather be fucking around behind the controls, trying to capture shit live and seeing what I can do with those takes like Ken Nelson recording Parachutes with Coldplay. Or anything the late Steve Albini did at Electrical Audio in Chicago. That shit never gets old. And that, among other things, makes me feel like the bright eyed kid I never got to be.
I think that gets the point across. Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. This has been Lazarus, your very feral, passionate, AuDHD gremlin sorcerer, signing off ✨
