We are but overinflated babies

so have mercy, yeah?

I haven’t yet met a single person who’s made it out of childhood unscathed - not to say that such a feat is outright impossible, or that parents or bad or whatever, just that I personally haven’t come across it in my little slice of the world and don’t really think it’s possible to do.  

Here’s what I think: Each and every one of us start life, as children, in a state of ignorance, self-centeredness, impulsivity, and fragility. Every disappointment and pain is extraordinarily intense, because each disappointment and pain is necessarily the first of its kind we experience. Our parents, even if they are perfectly loving and as present and attentive as they can be, will necessarily not be there for us sooner or later when we need them, since they can’t be everywhere in our lives and everywhere in theirs at the same time, and we will eventually come to know “abandonment” as a possibility for our lives, and will forever live in some form of dread of it and maybe one day be lucky enough to name it. 

Eventually, unfortunately, we have to grow up. As the years go by our responsibilities accumulate and the possibilities shrink away and the world turns to the next batch of babies as the precious new things and we are left to our own devices. We find ourselves having to contribute to others on their own terms if we want them to contribute to us too. We are required to put our own needs to the side at least a little bit in order to productively collaborate with people, and never again will we know the childhood feeling of the whole worshiping us and loving us and marveling at us just for existing if indeed we ever knew that feeling at all. 

And those are just the general features of this arc of our lives! Childhood tortures all of us in its own way, and we all show up into adulthood bent and scarred with baffling psychological injuries, tearing at each others scabs as we figure out how to fit together and love each other, and maybe if we are incredibly lucky we will find people who make us feel healed and understood in our pain and we get to know a moment’s peace before we die. 

Is this pessimistic? I don’t think so - I think it’s just our human condition, worth looking at bluntly and without judgment as a kind of explanatory principle. This situation, to me, is a secularized version of ‘original sin’ - our human turmoil isn’t a result of being moral perverts who disgust God but is instead a result of us just being overinflated babies that are all suffering and crying out for love. We can escape this condition only partially, and even with a lifetime of healing behind us we can still fall back into terrified-baby-mode in moments of severe distress. 

It brings me some peace to accept this - whatever frustrations we may have with the world as we know it, however we torture each other, whatever dumb and obvious things we miss on our first and last pass at being human, it’s all an inevitability, as morally neutral as the force of gravity. It also brings me some humility to remember this, since I remember that I too am still struggling to claw my way out of juvenility just like everyone else is, that I have no more right to judge and scold than anyone else, that everyone deals with their pain in their own way and that some of those ways will baffle me. The people I hate most of all, including myself, are all just crying out for love in complex and ever-shifting ways. 

The mark of maturity, as I see it, doesn’t involve transcending our need to be loved, since such an act is impossible. It’s not about whether or not you can stop needing love, it’s about whether or not you can give it.