When I look back to why I began to write when I was a child especially around age 8 when my cousin died was I was scared and trying to understand what was happening to me. I found writing down my thoughts often helped me better understand what was happening not only in my life but in the world around me.
Often the conversations you need as a child (I was an only child) don't happen if you don't have siblings and sometimes not even then. So, beginning to write when my cousin was killed in a car accident who was about 8 years older than I who was 16 and just beginning to drive what was then I heard a 1949 Dodge that he drove with friends into a house and this broke his neck and when he turned his head to ask if everyone was okay that was the last thing he ever did because his neck was broken.
So, if I look at one moment that began me writing trying to understand and to cope this would be it. So, Writing can be a way of trying to make some sense of your life when it isn't making sense to you. So, in some ways it is a way of both venting and self comforting enough to consider trying to stay alive even one more day in your lives.
I was always very intelligent like my Father so stupid explanations to things were never going to work for me like they would for some less intelligent than I always was.
So, for me, I need enough things to make sense so I just don't decide to just jump off a cliff in the general stupidity that I have found around me especially growing up as a child. I had to watch so many people beat up and emotionally destroyed during the 1950s in various ways where torture (at the very least psychological if not physical torture was a way of life then when I was growing up.)
Because I was usually bigger and stronger and a head taller than most people my age I wasn't almost ever being picked on because I would and could fight back physically if I needed to and everyone knew this. So, I found myself trying to protect girls and smaller boys who might not be able to defend themselves. This continued through grade school, Junior High School and by College most crazy and difficult people didn't go there and maybe either became criminals, died while racing cars, overdosed on drugs or joined the military (if the military would even put up with them). So, I found I didn't have to defend the weak so much when I got to college (at least physically anymore). So, I might have to defend people verbally but then again my father taught me to debate by age 8 and we debated everything you can imagine including Rock and Roll which my father called "Jungle bunny music" in the 1950s. But, for me, listening to rock and Roll I felt alive compared to feeling dead when I was around most adults then because they were just so miserable in their lives in the 1950s and before.
Suicide always seemed like a much better alternative to the miserable lives that most people lived in the 1950s that I saw everyday. But, by about 1969 I started to have hope for a life that I might not have to end with the new ideas of my generation which I found superior to most old ideas I had been taught.
However, over time I realized that the late 1960s people "Threw out the baby with the bathwater" and they have been trying to get the baby back ever since. Not sure they have succeeded.
So, the struggle for a meaningful worthwhile life continues for all mankind and so it should.
Thinking this way is especially meaningful during the time of coronavirus when people are ending their lives right and left because they feel they cannot move forward with their lives.
However, for me, the 1950s were so very much worse than anything now to survive that I find the era of coronavirus not that difficult for me in comparison. The Coronavirus era I equate more to being like World War II and the Great Depression if you combined them both together. As many people as died in World War II or more likely will die before coronavirus is done worldwide you likely will find within 10 years or so when the REAL figures of how many died might then be known worldwide.
For example, Russia all by itself lost 20 million people to World War II mostly through Starvation.
China is thought to also have lost 20 million people to World War II as well.
I think if the truth is ever known it will be at least this many once again from both countries from Coronavirus if the honest truth is ever known.
And a minimum of 2 million people tested likely will die in the U.S. especially between now and April or May of 2021 here as well especially because of the damage to this nation that Trump has and will do but the 2 million figure likely won't be reached until 2022.
Writing can help heal you and those around you and help to make sense of what is really happening inside you and around the world.
Rather than let things fester to the point where you go crazy or die write about what is bothering you because it will help you find ways to cope and to go on when otherwise you might just self destruct in the process.
There is always hope if you never give up. My forebears were pioneers on my father's side since they came from Switzerland in 1725 to Philadelphia. So, we are survivors here in the U.S. of everything that has happened from 1725 until now. Be a survivor! Figure out a way forward for yourselves and your families!
By God's Grace
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