Connecting the Dots

A chameleon-like childhood leads to tough but valuable lessons as an adult

As a nerdy kid growing up in a Gulf Coast petrochemical town, I did my best to fit in, but learned quickly that it was impossible. I became a chameleon, moving from group to group, avoiding the bullies and cliques that exist in every school.

Starting in middle school — yes, middle school; it was the late 1970s after all — I would hang out in the smoking circle with the kids who had no career desires beyond a life in the industrial plants that produced more than 10% of the oil and gas used daily in the U.S. I joined the local Thespian Troupe in high school despite my obvious lack of talent.

Journalism, later my chosen field, was a class I took because it was an easy A. I could watch, act detached, and silently narrate what was happening in a poor impersonation of the voiceovers from the nature films we endured during health class.

Being a chameleon has served me well as a journalist because I can find something to identify with in every group. To this day, I look and listen for little things — a baseball hat with a common team, a t-shirt featuring a particular musician, a place we’ve commonly been — to use as conversation starters. When I’m working on an on-location piece, I look at how an interview subject’s office is decorated — asking about the people in their pictures or the stories behind what they have hanging on the walls.

Connecting is important. It’s the biggest scar of feeling like you never belonged.

Memories Minus Nostalgia

There’s something about crossing the line of 50 that makes you look back at where you are, where you came from, and where you’ve been. For me, it’s not about being nostalgic, because the memories of being a student in Texas City are not good ones.

The first time I was punched was in fourth grade. I didn’t fight back, not knowing at the time it would only make things worse. I became an easy mark. Words that would be considered epithets today were hurled — inaccurately and insensitively — in my direction. My appearance, lack of style, poor social graces, and general physical ineptitude were all fair game, and the words left scars that have taken decades to heal.

I did nothing. Crying — something I naturally do, especially when overwhelmed — definitely made things worse.

My grandmother stayed with us during the early months of my dad’s dystonia, a movement disorder that started when I was 8 and caused his neck to be twisted at a 90-degree angle with severe muscle spasms. Grandmama helped with the cooking and cleaning while mom schlepped my father to various appointments and worked late to keep her classroom in order.

At the time, I did not realize what tremendous stress — financial and emotional — my parents were under. We had three meals a day, clothes, books to read. My parents, who had been married only nine years when my dad got sick, loved each other deeply when other couples would have abandoned ship, staying loyal until the end.

Dad was out of work for more than five years, and due to his physical issues would lose parts of four others before he retired from teaching three years before his death in 2007. In 1975, after almost two years on a regimen of painkillers — doctors discovered giving someone Valium, Demerol and another opioid at the same time could lead to a Zombie-like appearance, among other things — he began a host of experimental treatments that continued until his death.

Several times a week after school, when I was 10, we’d make the long drive to the south side of Houston on Interstate 45 so he could receive acupuncture. While we waited, I would beg my mom to take me to the Toys ‘R Us store on the other side of the freeway. Being a kid, I resented having to sit in the lobby, not knowing what it meant when I would catch a glimpse of my dad sitting there with needles coming out of his neck and back. Occasionally on the ride home he’d find one they’d failed to remove.

Starting in fifth or sixth grade, I started to withdraw further from my peers, spending most of my time scouring my dad’s collection of albums and 45s or throwing footballs at trees. Mom went to work early and given that my elementary school and the middle school were only a couple of blocks from each other, I would sit in the car and read or doze rather than attempt to socialize.

I used to hang out as much as possible at the local two-screen Tradewinds movie theater, seeing every movie that came through town, and then begging the manager to let me go through the movie posters she kept in the closet in her dark second-floor office next to the screening rooms. Learning facts about movies — just as I had learned facts about the presidents and NFL football — became another escape.

I did what I needed to get by in school, which came easily for me, especially after Texas City eliminated its gifted program just before my sixth-grade year. My mom would become so exasperated that I wasn’t fulfilling my “potential” that she would set a minimum grade for me on a particular test or subject. I did not just enough to hit the floor, never reaching for the ceiling.

For some time, I was proud that I didn’t open a high school textbook and managed to finish 33rd in a class of more than 350. It became my personal shield, a badge of honor. Because I knew so many facts that others found insignificant, I thought I was smart.

Learned facts have nothing on knowledge earned.

A series of Instagram images taken during a trip back to Texas, circa 2014

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Emotional Truth vs. Factual Truth

Growing up I never understood why people rarely — if ever — asked how you were doing. But then again, it seemed that no one shared their feelings or, God forbid, their secrets. Idle gossip about others, however, was fair game. And if the gossip was good, it didn’t seem to matter if it was true.

Today, it is tempting for some to excuse the bullying I endured by saying it was a different time. I chose to carry my feelings of isolation and abandonment with me and did not talk about them. I hid behind my intellectual shield. So why talk and write about it now?

Because I didn’t know what it meant then, and I didn’t know until much later how it shaped me.

It took me until I was 30 to realize that I had to live my own best life and— family and close friends/extended family aside — not give a damn what others thought. It took me until I was 42 — the year my father died — to realize that time was finite, and I had to be a better parent/person. That’s when I really started the journey to this imperfect (and quite frankly, beautiful) life.

Now, when I make mistakes, I own them. I work hard to understand why I respond a certain way when things happen — even if there’s no clear-cut answer — and make amends when I screw up (which is often).

Generally, I’m a glass half full person, but the bullies are still out there. When they hide behind their keyboards and smart phones, or paint symbols and scream epithets and feel emboldened to harm others, we must not be afraid to stand up to them.

Over the past several years, we’ve seen our country become divided in ways we would not have thought possible when we were kids. For my generation, which grew up dealing with the end and after-effects of Vietnam, social and racial divisions, the lingering effects of the Cold War, and a sagging economy, we had to have learned something, right?

Unfortunately, history seems doomed to repeat itself, with this variant seeming to be more powerful than the last. That is, unless we start to recognize there are two basic truths: “emotional” truth and “factual” truth.

Emotional truth is about your feelings — mad, sad, happy — while factual truth is Spock/Sheldon Cooper on steroids. One is subjective; the other is relentlessly objective. What we fail to recognize, as Amanda Palmer explained in this excellent Substack column, is that “both are TRUE. Emotional truth can be validated even when facts are false.”

Over the past couple of months, I’ve talked to a couple of classmates I’ve known since kindergarten, sharing stories from our respective childhoods. We now live in different parts of the country, far away from Texas City, and are in different fields and different places in our lives. What we have in common is the knowledge that we had to get out, for no other reason than to breathe and live a life beyond the confines of the town where we grew up.

The conversations were wonderful reminders that people from all walks of life, with shared experience but seemingly little in common, can connect even after decades apart. With the knowledge and scars of adulthood, we both bring something to the table when we choose to meet the other where they are from a place of humility rather than hubris.

That’s what I choose to do. Bullies and fear be damned.

And Finally…

Earlier this week, I sent you a brief missive asking you to vote for a cover photo I shot that is up for an American Society of Magazine Editors award. In it, I also included a link to some color photos I’ve taken over the past year during a series of trips to Central Virginia.

At the time, I promised another set of black and white photos would be published. Here’s a glimpse of a few, as well as a link to see the rest (you don’t have to be on Facebook to view them).

Thanks again for following me. Comments and likes, as always, are welcome and appreciated. I hope you’ll return next week.