{"id":291277,"date":"2025-03-31T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=291277"},"modified":"2025-03-30T10:12:58","modified_gmt":"2025-03-30T09:12:58","slug":"growing-up-with-fear-and-self-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/03\/growing-up-with-fear-and-self-awareness\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing Up with Fear and Self-Awareness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>26 Mar 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0When I write about personal matters, I quickly stumble into one of life\u2019s puzzling ironies: Every one of us is unique, and we\u2019re also part of a collective whole.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Self-awareness essentially means straddling that divide.<\/p>\n

This thought came up for me in the past week, when I started doing my best to ignore the news of the day and begin focusing on the details, big and little, of . . . my own life. Yeah, I\u2019ve decided (at age 78) to start writing a memoir. Maybe now\u2019s the time.<\/p>\n

I started wandering through my childhood and adolescence, trying to figure out how I wound up creating the guy now sitting in front of his computer screen, and I quickly started digging through some of the old journal notebooks I have saved, dating back to tenth grade. In my English class that year, one of the books we were assigned to read was The Diary of Anne Frank<\/em>. To say it had an impact on me is putting it mildly.<\/p>\n

My God, she was only 15 when she died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, shortly before the war ended. When I read her diary, I was also 15. There the comparison ends, but I nonetheless felt a compelling need to put something<\/em> into words about my own life, whatever it was. Did I have an actual life? Or was I just wandering around pointlessly, lost, shy and inadequate?<\/p>\n

I started journaling a number of times over the next year, always abandoning the process after a couple of entries, until, in the midst of my junior year, something clicked. I\u2019ve been journaling most of my life.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a quote from one of those early stabs at self-awareness, dated March 6. 1962. It begins with this warning: \u201cProperty of Bob Koehler: Do not read.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, let\u2019s start reading anyway. I think he might be flattered. Here\u2019s how it begins:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn English class we are reading the Diary of Anne Frank. Anne says that she started her diary because she did not have a friend with whom to share her innermost thoughts. I also am in want of such a friend. Like Anne, I have ideas, views, outlooks, whatever you want to call them, that I must express to someone. Thus, I create you, but, until I can think of an appropriate name for you I will call you Understanding Friend, U.F. for short.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, if you don\u2019t mind, I would like to pour out my heart to you. I consider myself the most lonely, unhappy and miserably misunderstood creature in the universe. , , ,\u201d<\/p>\n

Wow, the dawn of self-awareness. Or so it seemed as I started reading my words six-plus decades later. (Can you believe? I still have all these ancient notebooks on a bookshelf in my study.) And I started thinking about the irony of language. A language is a collective means of communication, allowing even personal thoughts to be collective. Words don\u2019t have private meanings. But here I was, using this collective communication process to speak only to myself: to establish myself as a singular entity. The entry continues:<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not consider myself unloved, because I have the feeling my parents care for me. I do not consider myself totally unpopular, but I know for certain that I am left out of many activities in which my friends participate. Nor can I entirely blame them. If I could see myself from the outside, I\u2019m not sure if I would like what I saw. I am shy and bashful, especially with girls, and am usually not comfortable in the presence of other people even my own age. I am quite certain I give people the impression I am indifferent to them or bored with them. It is actually just the opposite. I want to say nice things to people, but I simply cannot bring myself to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh life! If growing up, becoming myself, was simply an orderly procee, there would be no such thing as self-awareness \u2013 which happens in a state of isolation, and it\u2019s often a disconcerting, possibly even, at times, a terrifying phenomenon.<\/p>\n

For instance, I can still hear \u2013 feel \u2013 myself crying in the middle of the night, when I was a little boy. Mom and Dad had gone out somewhere and Sis and I were staying at a relative\u2019s house. I woke up in the middle of the night, crying desperately: Where\u2019s Mom?<\/p>\n

These were life-defining tears, a nightmare morphing into real life. Mom in that black sealskin coat, so soft and furry. How I loved the feel of the fur on my face as I hugged her. Mom! Mom! She was loving, caring, smart\u2013 a teacher of English and Latin, but now a housewife. I was the oldest child, But during her second pregnancy, when Little Bobby was 2, one of Mom\u2019s sisters, who was a nurse, got infected and wound up dying. Mom had loved her dearly and the impact it had on her was enormous.<\/p>\n

After Susie\u2019s birth . . . and mind you, I had no idea whatsoever that anything like this was going on . . . Mom had what would later be called post-partem depression, but at that time, the late \u201940s, was simply known as a nervous breakdown. Mom with a newborn and a 2-year-old! She was hospitalized and her family stepped in to save the day. Mom was in the process of receiving electroshock therapy, and several of her sisters moved in to take care of the newborn. Dad had to move out. And I was sent off to live at another sister\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

Mind you, these are details I learned from a cousin three-plus decades later. I have no specific memories of any of this. I was just a tiny mushball of a toddler, with zero perspective on what was happening, zero ability to understand anything that might have been \u201cexplained\u201d to me. Mom\u2019s family did, I\u2019m certain, their absolute best to handle this chaotic tragedy. I don\u2019t know how long Mom was hospitalized or in recovery, or how long I lived at Aunt Marie\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

But the family did reunite and things returned, more or less, to normal \u2013 but I was left, you might say, with a hole in my psyche: a looming dark spot, a fear of abandonment that would pop up oh so unexpectedly when I found myself separated from Mom and Dad. I had to grow up around this dark spot, and I did.<\/p>\n

And today I nurture it. What else can I do? I am who I am because of it.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/em>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Mar 2025\u00a0–\u00a0When I write about personal matters, I quickly stumble into one of life\u2019s puzzling ironies: Every one of us is unique, and we\u2019re also part of a collective whole. Self-awareness essentially means straddling that divide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[261,2536,3086,688],"class_list":["post-291277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-awareness","tag-collectivism","tag-individualism","tag-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291277"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":291281,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291277\/revisions\/291281"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}