Metaphors of Life (part 2)

ADOLESCENCE

As I matured from childhood and my life experiences expanded, I transformed into a cactus. The center was still tender, soft, vulnerable; but it was now protected from the harsher elements of my expanding environment with a prickly exterior. I was growing to recognize that I was not the center of the universe and, significantly, not everyone in the world was conspiring to make me happy.

The starkest evidence of this new paradigm was revealed with my incarceration in elementary school. The teachers were like guards who kept me from escaping the toxicity of the classroom; but worse than the guards was the other prisoners. My siblings and I were social lepers who were isolated from the main population presumably because we were so different. Most were the children of town people, college professors, doctors, and other professionals while we were from a chicken farm, we dressed funny and smelled bad. My cactus exterior was a defense to keep the marauders at bay.

Junior high school reinforced my view that school was a penal complex, and I was even more defensive during those years. Eventually, I came to understand that other people don't think about us nearly as often as we think they do--that most people are wrapped up in their own thought and worries, and that most are pretty nice if you give them a chance. I also started to realize that being so thorny was blocking all possible relationships, not just the undesirable ones. Gradually I succeeded in loosing the thistles and the hard exterior. It basically took the balance of my school career, but not long after graduation I had transformed myself into a shrub.