More bumps in the night- Now and Then

The night creeps in, again.

Why is that anyway? During the day, I am fine. Life is as it is, and I go with the flow. Then the sun goes down.

And I start to doubt everything again.

Have I done all I should do? If not, will I get a do-over? Will I then know what I should have done or how to do whatever it is I am still fretting over? Who will tell me? Will anyone care one way or another? Will anything I do even make any difference, anyway?

Life gets funny at times. Is anyone laughing?

All of this self-doubt will disappear at sunrise.

I hope.

If you have not already guessed, I have self-esteem issues. It seems pointless. It seems to be a lifetime affliction. I have been better recently, but that is during the day. The night focuses on doubt. It focuses on those other bumps in the night, the ones I am only aware of in this quiet time. 

Like many others I know, I had excellent teachers early on in learning to doubt myself, in the person of my parents.

My father was the one who first raised doubts about my looks. He told me I was funny-looking, like Alfred E. Newman funny-looking. Later, he would amend that to say that I looked like Ernie on the old Sixties sitcom My Three Sons. Of course, I wanted to look like one of the more normal sons. You know, the handsome ones.

I was confused. I did not think Ernie looked like Alfred E. Newman at all, so how could I look like either of them? Even though I knew the logic was flawed, I bought the premise.

My mother was not as obvious in setting me up for self-doubt, but she had her own impact on me, nonetheless.

She made me wonder why I ever pursued education beyond high school. Throughout my early school days, my teachers had told me that college should be my educational goal. So, my goal had always been to go to college like my brother and sister had before me. My mom thought that it was all a waste of time and money. Go to a trade school, she would tell me. Avoid the disappointment of failing.

Why?

You could fail. You are not like them.

Oh, so that means I am not smart enough to go to college?

You get the drift. I wonder if she told my sister and brother the same thing.

Avoiding failure by aiming too low was a central part of her message. I do not blame her for imparting her fears to me. She had to get it somewhere. Her parents, no doubt, influenced her as much as she did me.

At some point in the early college days, I was doing fine. Then my wife at the time had an affair and dumped me like so much trash. Like a hot potato. She could not get away from me fast enough. And who was it that got her going in ways that I could not? (I have to be vague. This is a family blog.)

The guy that I lost my marriage over was someone who literally reminded me of a way too tall and skinny version of Ernie, from My Three Sons. Throw in the weirdness of Alfred E. Newman, and you have him.

The irony was not lost on me, either.

The one thing, or maybe the two things, that I learned from this earlier time in my life is that none of those imposed limits on me were valid. Not then, and certainly not now.

I have learned from attending class reunions that there were many (a few at least; there it goes again) young ladies in my classes then who may have wanted to know me better. Again, I am being purposely vague. Maybe things would not have gone very far, but I never gave it a chance back then to see how far anything might have gone.

Then there is the matter of my self-esteem after my divorce. This divorce messed with my head for five years. I thought I was done. I lost the will to even try to find anyone new. Now, I look back at pictures of myself from that time and literally do not recognize the person in them as “me.”

There was a picture of me from about the time I was still married, and I thought I looked fairly good.

Then, just a few months after the divorce, there was that same guy in a tuxedo at my sister’s wedding. I had totally forgotten about this and didn’t even recognize that guy as me. Who was I then that I had no clue how I looked?

It was all needless, and I regret the time I lost not knowing who I was because of the filters others imposed on me. I regret not getting to know those around me then, who may have wanted to get to know me.

I regret that until more recently, I did not know myself.