This is one of my favorite pictures from childhood. I've shared it here before and will probably share it again. It shows me at age 11 or 12, playing with my tomahawk, dressed in a muslin breechclout and wool tunic. Wanting nothing to do with society's status quo, this is how I dressed at that age.
Instead of doing normal kid stuff, I learned traditional woodland skills and became adept with weapons. These things gave me confidence to begin breaking free from patterns of harm that I felt trapped in. It was around this time that I told my dad that I'd murder him if he ever hit me again. He never did, but he acted visibly embarrassed and ashamed of me most of the time.
Our relationship eventually improved with lots of conscious effort. Over the years, I came to accept that he'd been doing his best as someone who had barely entered his twenties when I came along. He came to accept that it was okay for me to be myself. These days, things are great between us.
My relationship with my mom was fine growing up, though she was always in denial about my dad's abuse and kind of just left me to fend for myself. As an adult, I've listened to her reminisce about tying me to my crib with neckties as a baby so I wouldn't go anywhere, and about fitting me with a dog leash so I could play outside without running away. I don't remember that, but it does help explain the high value I've always placed on freedom.
In school, I was bullied by other students until I began seriously fighting back. Unfortunately, I couldn't fight back against the small town school administrators and police who also bullied me constantly. So I quit school after grade 8 and moved out of my parents' house a year later. My strongest desire was simply to be free, but the larger world that I found wasn't free at all.
In fact, what I found was a society run by power abusers. Some of these were people who, like my father, abused their power because they never learned to handle having power. But many were abusers with more insidious motives. Sometimes these motives were financial. Sometimes they were sexual. Sometimes they were ideological, or related to status in social systems or various hierarchies. Even people who said they wanted freedom usually just wanted power over others.
On a deeper level, what I found was that almost anyone was capable of abusing power, and that many power abuses seemed directly related to attempts to compensate for shortcomings in the bad systems underpinning society in its entirety. Would I have been leashed if there was community childcare available? Would my dad have hit me if the family system he'd come from had been healthy? Maybe not.
I'm grateful to have had childhood experiences that conditioned me to recognize patterns of abuse and free myself from them. At this point, I consider the freedom I've always craved to equal freedom from these patterns. That's a tall order in a world too often indistinguishable from abusive systems. And yet, progress towards this freedom keeps happening in my life, usually as a consequence of unapologetically being my authentic self.
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