My things planned that ended up in a garbage heap!
Learn how impossible it is trying to live on the edge of lies, fantasies, and fears...
I was born scared. And that’s a sad fact.
This is not an off-the-cuff statement.
From a very early age, I existed with an unpalatable sense of something bad brewing and threatening to blow up in my face.
There were no visible or “rational” reasons for such fears, but they, still, were my constant companions.
My parents were decent hard-working people who, despite their own tortures thanks to ending up in Greece as persecuted penniless Asia Minor refugees, never allowed their own terrible losses to rub on my sister and I (both Mom and Dad never ever spoke about the Horror to the very last day of their lives).
In daily life, I was mostly free to do as I pleased—something that was unusual in those days. That I was naturally distant from causing real trouble helped me to enjoy freedoms rarely allowed back then to “young people” of my age.
I clearly remember how happy I was being allowed to go the movies alone (!) in downtown Athens (!) at the age of eleven (of course, Greece back then was a verified safe place for both children and adults). I also had the license to roam quite aways from our neighborhood as I pleased to visit places I found interesting. I rode buses and took long walks to examine the surroundings and absorb the “knack” necessary to get the drift, or ambiance, of places and neighborhoods.
All along, I never touched “bad company.” I never sneaked out to light a cigarette or take a peak of “improper” magazines, which, by current standards, were quite close to innocuous sultry crappy comics. I had not bosom buddy friends, save one person, and I was definitely not “social.”
Girls were non-existent save a few grade school classmates I secretly “loved.”
I never smoked in secret (and never smoked in my life) and I read both children’s and “serious” books. At the age of 12, I finished The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer that, in many ways, created the foundation of what I chose to study beyond high school.
All along, my imagination was always running rampant.
One day I was a RAF fighter pilot shooting down grizzled Nazi bastards flying stukas. The next day I was battling vicious storms in the Atlantic and saving fair ladies in distress as the waves slammed the creaking ship to near death. By the end of the week, I was setting foot in the depths of the Indies as a soldier of Alexander the Great…..
…… and on and on and on… until I’d wake up in the early morning to begin another day of tortuous drudgery in the classroom (never really liked school).
Once high school was out of the way, plans of what to do next were non-existent.
The death of my father in 1967 sunk the family in utter penury and signaled the beginning of what I identified, very many years later, as the cause of frequent “panic attacks” fueled by gnawing insecurity.
I did get a poor man’s job to somehow contribute to our survival—and I did attend the (Athens) Graduate School of Economic and Commercial Sciences for one whole boring year, trying to build a decent existence in the absence of money, but abandoned economics for utter lack of interest.
And, then, my unexpected good luck opened the door of traveling to America to begin a real education that lasted nine long years and culminated in writing a doctorate that was accepted with highest honors by the University of Edinburgh in good ole Scotland.
The fact utterly surprised the few, who knew me in my previous life in school, and quite many who came to know me in later life as well.
Back in Greece, I quickly moved up the professional ladder and, more importantly, I got to know and, eventually marry, my recently estranged wife, a woman of impeccable education and taste, who woke up one day in 2019 an entirely changed person and relegated me to the ranks of despicable husbands and fathers in a few short weeks of working in cahoots with our two daughters (although it is now obvious the conspiracy was several years long).
And so, on July 29, 2019, I was forcibly returned almost to the emotional point I had started before I left for the USA in 1972 by being bundled on a plane in Seattle with a one-way ticket to Athens. That I did not resist this rather despicable nastiness is a VERY long story of knowing full well all three female members of the family harbored issues that could easily boil into a full-blast dangerous outburst with unforeseen consequences.
And so, penniless, ailing, and an exile from my adopted American homeland, I was pushed, almost instantly, back onto a state of the primordial grinding childhood fear I thought I had succeeded in “curing” so many decades before. And abject penury, to the level of indigency, added an enormous burden to daily life on top of fearful psychological threats and fears.
So, what are some key “strategic” lessons one may cull from this story of never learning how to defeat fear and getting to train one’s self in building effective life-saving defenses?
Here’s a quick working list gleaned from hard-earned experience:
Never underestimate dexterities you know you possess and learn, as early as possible, how to deploy them to your advantage both professionally and as daily life boosters.
Learn how to control, and eventually, discard fears that are leftovers from a less than average early life, but be eternally vigilant of signs that these nasty negatives are surreptitiously making a crawling comeback.
Choose people to trust with the utmost scrutiny. Never allow yourself to be swayed by “sweet talk,” good looks, fancy promises that sound so utterly perfect, and steadily escalating, and thinly veiled, demands for “friendly” requests of your personal work without recompence that quickly become routine.
If you marry, hopefully after an honest period of acquaintance and heart-to-heart “psychoanalysis,” never allow your guard to weaken. Learn how to identify signs of even the slightest discomfort in your spouse and never postpone an invitation to discuss the problem(s) at hand.
Irrespective of your own likes and dislikes learn how to “create space” for the moods of your spouse. Don’t be the instant “shove aside” type and/or the in-your-face smart alec. Both these bad habits can cause unimaginable instant, as well as long-term, reaction from your spouse leading, almost without fail, to enmity and eventual separation and/or divorce.
Treasure the opinions of a very carefully select number of honest friends. Train yourself in spotting classic indications of unsuitability. “Dear Betsy,” a likable woman who, nevertheless, can knock out the party with relentless crap about her latest visit to Venice, is off your list by default—just like suave investor Gary, who breaths dollar signs and won’t give you a chance of uttering one single word once he begins “analyzing” what is the latest “investment 5-star opportunity” in town. Choose quiet, decent, non-colorful educated types and learn how to carefully listen and ask pertinent questions.
Never conclude that anything above a routine glitch, that appears not to have a threatening life expectancy, will defuse by itself “given time.” Make room for an honest talk with your affected opposite soonest possible.
Try to stay away from grandiose life-changing plans that require literally existential changes in your ways of life without a detailed targeted assessment of the chances of success and the endurance of the material assets that will underpin the attempt.
Remember that humans are extremely imperfect creatures. While you can’t live in constant, and debilitating, Sherlock-Holms type vigilance, make sure you “jot down” your own private notes of even the little things that seem of no consequence at the time they happened. Everything, however small and seemingly insignificant, may turn out to be an important Red Light at the crossroads.
And, finally, teach yourself how NOT to become agitated at the slightest. Humans are terribly and subconsciously imperfect creatures tittering on the edge of an abyss that nobody sees but the person doing the tittering. A good preemptive measure is to “calibrate” the limits of persons to whom you’re intimately connected, especially when you suspect something more serious is brewing—because once the cannonade begins there’s almost always no way to cease the firing and restore “peace.”
Lessons “pre-learned” are definitely far better than lessons “post-learned” amidst the wreckage of the desolate (ex) family battlefield.