Hey, Kid,

You're not alone any more

Housekeeping: Life’s all about the follow-through, isn’t it? I’ve been writing up a code for the new studio, basically rules to follow while you’re there—and realized I have both “BE PERSISTENT” and “KNOW WHEN TO QUIT” written down. That’s a whole ‘nother post, but today I’m going to follow through and finish up the mangrove-swamp-cut-foot adventure.

***

I’ve had some time to reprocess the whole mangrove-swamp foot-gash thing these past few days, and it’s been a good thing to realize that actually…what happened might have been the best thing to happen, given what was going on with my foot.

Yeah, the teacher ignored me, but I don’t know if she’d have had the guts to really handle that wound. It NEEDED to be scrubbed out. I don’t know if she could have done it. I don’t know if, as an adult of 50, *I* could do it to a child that age. And I’m not convinced that just washing it out would have gotten all the bad bacteria out of it.

So, a good lesson I learned—I could take care of myself, and I could do what needed to be done to save myself even if it hurt like the bejesus.

Pictured: my interior emotional landscape after this experience. I just plugged some of the lyrics to “Harold and Joe” into Midjourney, and it did pretty well…

It did make the rest of that school trip pretty arduous though. I was limping around, lagging even farther behind than I had been before, and not able to put my foot into enclosed shoes at all. None of the teachers noticed, until…

It was the last night we were at the hotel, and we were due to fly out the next day around noon as I remember. Another kid managed to cut his finger on something sharp, and he went to a teacher and she gave him some hydrogen peroxide and some Band-Aids. He went outside to clean his wound, and I followed him out because I figured even though my foot seemed like it was healing OK, it could probably use a little more care.

I was pouring the peroxide over my semi-scabbed wound when the teacher came out and saw what I was doing. It was a different one from the one who’d ignored me, but she absolutely lost her shit. Flipped out and started yelling at me.

WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ANYONE ABOUT THIS?!

I couldn’t get a word in edgewise to say, yeah, but I DID try to tell you guys, multiple times, and nobody paid a damn bit of attention to me.

Well, even if I could have said that, it would have just gotten me in more trouble. This was 1983, and the world of being a kid was a lot more brutal back then. So I buttoned my lip, took the scolding, and finished fixing my foot again.

In retrospect I’m sure that the teacher was just scared. She was probably not older than about 30, and the situation of trying to keep all us kids in line for the few days before must have been pretty stressful. If I’d come home with septicemia it would have been on her and the other teachers.

Still, fuck a bunch of her attitude. It sucked to be yelled at like that.

I developed an attitude of my own in response. The other lesson I learned out of all this, which wasn’t maybe so useful, was that you can’t ever rely on adults to help you out when you’re in trouble. They just make things worse.

And I got a note from the nurse that specified I didn’t have to wear my dress shoes to school until my foot was healed. But the school wasn’t about to let me wear a pair of flip flops. They let me wear ONE flip flop, and one dress shoe, and I limped around in resentment with my gait all fucked up for another week or so until the swelling went down. I kept limping even when my foot was healed and I could wear matching shoes. It wasn’t long after that that I started getting back spasms.

And so here we are, 41 years later. I’m undoing my own shitty attitude, and the sciatica that resulted. I have compassion for my little self, and I can forgive those teachers. It’s time to let it all go.

*BRRRR* time’s up!

Song-in-my-head: