Anyone who is reading this blog is likely a giant right now, at least in proportion to something (or someone) else. In the first part, I mentioned how children feel small in comparison to adults, but I'll spend some time giving more examples.
Some of us have personalities that are "larger than life" that may make people feel insignificant. Some of us are in positions of power that affect the well-being of another human being. Some of us are trusted with secrets that are so big that we could ruin one of our friends if we let it out. Hell, I've heard of people ending relationships because the person that they are with is too "good" for them.
It's hard to be around someone who makes you feel small, yet it's even worse when that might be the right way to think about it.
Most of us have a problem with wanting to be bigger; we are all giants when compared to someone else. All of us are huge in some way, and our hugeness scares those smaller than us.
I want to confess the moment where I learned this to be true in my life. I say confess because it is a moment I'll never forget.
When I was a child in daycare, I had instructors who liked to jokingly be rough with the children. It was not uncommon for them to punch us playfully, give noogies, terrorize us with Indian burns, or frighten us with the threat of these things. But I was never afraid of my instructors. We all did it and knew that it was all joke. In reality, we were deeply loved. It was all done in good humor, and our instructors proved that to us by putting bullies in their place and standing up for us when we needed a hero.
This is why I felt myself to be extremely blessed the first time I got hired as a daycare instructor; I wanted to be one of the playful big guys that I loved.
Yet a few months into my job, I got called into the principal's office. My daycare supervisor was sitting there with the principal. Evidently, a little girl had gone home and told her dad that she was scared to go back to school because I had threatened to beat her up. I don't remember doing this, but I would not have been surprised to have said it. As I mentioned before, this rough kind of joking play was what I was raised on. I explained how I would never hurt a child and my boss supported me, but the principal thought it best to remove me from that position because the father had threatened to remove his daughter from the school permanently if I was still there.
At the time, I thought this was an overreaction, both on the part of the parent and the part of the child, but now I don't think so. The truth of the matter was that I had not realized how big I had become. I was 16 at the time yet still thought of myself as a child; who could possibly be scared of me? Ironically, this was also the time when I started to play rugby because I was considered a "big guy".
At the time, I never put two-and-two together and felt cheated out of a job. But I realized how I must have looked to the poor child. I scared a little girl because I failed to realize how huge and menacing I looked to her.
As I mentioned before, most people have a problem with wanting to be too big, but I lived with the desire to want to be smaller. I did not want to matter more, I actually wanted to matter less. When you're big, the world is on your shoulders and a tiny, miscalculated step can crush someone you care about. When you're small, you can't hurt anyone.
For me, it was always better to not take a risk than risk hurting someone. Better to deflect responsibility than to misuse it. Better to have not loved than to have loved and lost. Better to be small and overlooked than large and feared.
But this is a bad response.
If you have not read East of Eden, you should stop reading this blog and go read that book instead, because it is better. However, if you are alright with me spoiling it a little, read on.
You are in a tough spot when you find yourself relating to Cathy in the book. Cathy is a very cold character (to put it mildly) throughout the story, but her death scene is tragic. She is terrible, cruel, and remorseless, yet as she dies, she remembers her childhood and her imagined friendship with Alice from Wonderland. She reflects on how she always wished she could shrink down with Alice so they could play together, away from everyone else.
From the start of the book, Cathy was described as knowing that she missed something that other people had. Some spark was not in her. This made her very capable to deal with the world, but she never felt like she was a part of it. Survival was her only instinct, but someone who only lives to survive cannot be happy. When she took her own life, it was because she felt overwhelmed with everything that was happening with her.
The world was too big, and Cathy could not cope with it.
When Cathy's life gets too big for her, she becomes cold and calculating to deal with it, but inside she just wishes that it never got big. She does not want to be responsible. She knows she cannot handle it. Yet this deep feeling of detachment and smallness brings her to do horrible things without realizing they are bad.
She abandons her newborn children because she is worried that they will shackle her down. On another level, I think she abandons them because she knows she cannot be a good mom.
On one hand, being smaller makes your life easier, but on the hand, it hurts people just as much as the giant.
Growing up is inevitable, but because their is no actual way to grow small, we're sometimes left as giants who feel small. I felt small, which made it possible for me to terrify a little girl. That was my mistake. Cathy wanted to be small, so she abandoned her children without a second thought. That was her mistake.
We all become giants at some point, not matter how much we wish that was not the case. So how do we cope?
*A quick aside: people still have 5 days to do the prose and poetry challenge. You should submit something!
