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None of your teenage angst here! Let’s get this straight, this thread is for recalling all those rotten things you did that eat you up with guilt in the small hours despite the fact that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing you can do about it now. This thread is for all of those recollections of childhood that you only end up sharing with those loved ones you’ve gotten so close to you think you’ll be forgiven any admission, however brutal. Maybe you did a bad thing or called someone a bad name. It’s for the despicable things that you did and you felt awful about, but where you’ve stopped being the person that committed those acts so long ago that they’ve transformed from transgressions into cute anecdotes you think it’s safe to share, but you probably deserve to be despised for, however minor your actions might seem now.
I’ll go first.
One of my first strong memories is playing in our living room when I was maybe five, my younger sister sitting on the floor playing with her doll and my mother ironing. My mother having left the room, I started investigating the upper reaches of the room, crawling and jumping over the couch, until, bored, I decided to see if the now unattended ironing board could also be explored. Crawling on my knees, maybe even trying to walk along its length, there was an audible snap as the board snapped at the end under my weight, and I somehow escaped injury. When my mother returned, overcome with thoughts of parental retribution for this act, I quickly turned in my clueless, innocent sister as the culprit, who in turn ratted on her beloved baby doll. My mother may have believed me, but did not believe my sister, and I escaped all punishment. It was only years and years later, by which time even my sister had come to believe she was responsible, that (now beyond the consequences) I admitted to them both my shocking, cold-blooded lie. Me and my sister get on fine now. Just about.
My next guilty memory comes from being on holiday, maybe a few years later, and paddling around the pool with a gang of kids, my patsy sister still in tow. And a German kid who’d been hanging around, for whatever reason, wasn’t letting anyone else get a shot of the lilo. Our lilo. Reader, I punched him. In the face. And while I was still working out what came next found myself instinctively squaring up, seething mind you, to the boy’s father, who must have outweighed me four or five times over, and who in retrospect must have moved pretty quickly for a guy of his bulk to get down into the water next to me. Anyway, no major harm done, everybody backed off. But residual sense of culpability for not finding a better way to resolve whatever the argument was in another way aside, I didn’t actually feel guilty for hitting the kid. He was obviously in the wrong, he wouldn’t back down, so I hit him. What’s left is a strangely impersonal guilt that my parents and grandparents, after the initial incident, rather than remonstrating with me for flinging my fists around, seemed to pass it off as a joke, made jokes about having a boxer in the family, they even seemed strangely proud of me. And even though I was still too angry to be that receptive to the vague idea that “fighting is wrong”, I sort of expected them to treat it more seriously, and they didn’t, and that was strange.
Oh, and on another childhood holiday I stole some sweets that had fallen on the floor of the shop and read a Batman comic without paying, until I was turned over to my grandfather who walked back with me to the villa we were staying in, silently.
Hmmm, once you’ve started thinking about these they just keep coming don’t they? A few years later again, at a new school, I kicked one of my friends really, really hard. We were out in the playing fields, and we all seemed to be toy-fighting or… roughhousing? Anyway, I don’t remember the motivation but I remember his pale, somewhat chubby skin under the sunlight and I remember how the little ridges of his spine stood out as shirtless he bent over on the ground as some calculation of resentment, vulnerability and opportunity took place. And I kicked him really hard across his back. And afterwards, as he lay there taking these huge, sobbing breaths and as our friends shouted at me, it was one of those moments where all I could think about were the consequences for me, about newspapers proclaiming “Tullibody boy paralysed after attack by schoolpal” or something. It was heart-stopping. I thought that was it for me. And in the end, nothing ever came of it, he was ok, we continued being friends until long ago we forgot all about one another.
The last thing I remember feeling guilty about was in primary school, I guess I would be about ten or eleven. Our teacher, I can’t quite remember why, made some sort of comment about being on holiday, maybe it was something to do with a bathing suit, maybe it was about camping. And it was funny and we all laughed. And I liked my teacher; sometimes I was angry with her because she complained about my chicken-scratch handwriting, or because she didn’t understand, but she looked after me, in her way. And after she made that comment I raised my voice and out of my mouth came something to the effect that, were she camping or bathing she would need double the material – for indeed she was a lady of ample girth. Maybe I said “you’d need a tent” or “get a double” I don’t remember. But the whole room went quiet. This wasn’t sniggering about the teacher in the playground, complaining about some real or imagined injustice. I’d pointed out the elephant in the room of my teacher’s weight at just the moment the class was brought together by her suggestion of it. And I hadn’t done it because I was angry, I’d done it because there was a moment of opportunity, a chance to make some crude, spiteful and even figurative comment about one of her weaknesses, maybe just purely out of the realisation that I could, that there was a gap in the language that could be filled, and I did. And it was so cowardly. It was an awful thing to do. And it was basically senseless. And to her credit she never made an issue of it with me afterwards. But I felt bad for ages and I never did go back and visit like the rest of the kids.
And I look back now and it’s… who was that kid? Where did he go? Is he still here? And I don’t know. And it probably doesn't matter. Anyway. Think these are small fry? Then post your guilt-inducing memories here! You might experience cathartic release, but, well, probably not. |
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