seanessay.com (under 1,000 words)
This week I clicked on a very successful blogger, who is also a voice actor and screen actor: Will Wheaton. (Link) I’m sure he’s a normal seeming fellow, and he has a past. Me too. His post is about speaking for the ACE resource network: Adverse Childhood Experiences, and their NumberStory.org (link)
Feel free to drop my modest little post to go click on Wheaton’s post with his link to ACE.
…As for context, as for explaining myself and Will, by comparison to each other, I dare not: No, because in my self-help group we learned that it is just not helpful, and a big mistake, to compare. A better context for explaining me is linear through time: I was not always the normal seeming man you see before you. Meaning: There is hope for us all. Hence today’s essay.
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Two quotes From a Travis McGee novel, #14, The Scarlet Ruse, by John D. MacDonald:
(Travis goes to an office to meet a big criminal)
“His voice was a bit high for the size of him, and he projected it with very little lip movement and no animation an his face at all. It is characteristic of people who have either been in prison or who live in such a manner that their total environment becomes a prison of sorts, a place where communications can be a deadly risk.”(Page 181)
(Travis goes to meet a care worker, to ask her opinion on a suspect she used to work in a store with) She answers:
“…She was, and is, a very troubled person, I think. She never discusses her background. I had thought her a fugitive in the legal sense. Now I think she is a fugitive from emotion…”(Turns out she had been stuck in an unhappy “school for girls.” Not one of those voluntary ones called “girl’s schools”) (Page 205)
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Musing on a sports metaphor for emotions, I remember both basketball, and being an older—“you’re timeless, Sean”—member of our campus-based Toastmasters club.
Basketball
Sunday afternoon. No one else around. I am an adolescent back in town visiting my older brother and we are outside at the local high school to shoot a few baskets. A guy comes by with a ball: It is Bueller, a boy on the school varsity team. My brother had been on his school team, but as for me, well, I was more suited to the library. Bueller, a friendly fellow, had seen me years ago around other players, but didn’t know I had been away, so he thought I was still at the school and more skilled than I actually was. Skilled at catching a passed ball, I mean.
Catching that ball? It was like when ice hockey legend Geordie Howe—they’ve named a bridge after him—was many years into his retirement, and a journalist did a story on him, and they did a little ice time. Howe passed the puck, his blade connecting: Crack!—puck slides over to the reporter’s stick—Crack! The reporter nearly dropped his hockey stick! The old man could still pass hard.
So, that lazy afternoon, my brother and Bueller and I spent some desultory time passing the ball, swishing baskets, and shooting the breeze. Nothing serious. Except—I kept worrying I was going to drop the ball! My choice: I could risk the big shame of fumbling an easy pass, or take the little shame of saying, to a guy who surely didn’t know anyone he would pass gently to, “Hey, could make all your passes softer?” I just crossed my fingers, focused intently, and managed to get through the afternoon without fumbling. Whew!
Campus Club
As a grown man, happy to have survived things, of course I smiled a lot at the university Toastmasters club. (For public speaking) I looked like a normal guy, just extra happy. Except—I still couldn’t do most emotions. Our club met at a huge roundtable, in a big circular chamber, like King Arther meets the Enterprise. A young lady, Kathy, often sat beside me. Kathy would spin her head over to flash me a big smile, or a look of big excitement, big incredulity, big joy… So scary! I was tempted to fumble the passing of emotion by dropping my eyes or looking away. Tempted to signal, “Soften your emotions please, lest I have to break our connection.”
But I coped, it all worked out. Whew!
Kathy was young and fun, too innocent to have known anyone from a “school for boys.” I’m still chuckling over the time a bunch of us, at the end of classes, rented The Graduate and she laughed to say, “It’s sure strange to finally see the actual movie after you’ve seen it parodied three times.” (On The Simpsons, for example) I’ll tell you what’s strange: Once she phoned me up to invite me to her house for a party, because “you are so fun.” Well, I thought, how did I ever get that label? Fun? It just goes to show you never know.
Now
I can do speeches and essays on basic, exciting-to-me stuff: How to get a sense of humour, how to learn to be nice, and more. (Incidentally, the most efficient learning is by role modelling—I say that as a former “rehabilitation practitioner, class II”)
I am still in toastmasters, now in a “new age” club where we hug instead of shaking hands. Toastmasters International is ostensibly to learn “public speaking” and “leadership.” In reality? Many people join for self-improvement and self-confidence. I keep my eyes open for folks with a past who silently struggle. You never know.
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Sean Crawford
“One hour of therapy equals seven hours of 12-step meetings,”
a friend,
May 2021
Footnote: My essay Getting to Nice ran here in November 2020
