What happens to us when we are children remains with us for the rest of our lives.
It is a rather Freudian perspective, but I nevertheless feel as though it has some merit to it. That isn't a statement about sexual motivation, though the argument can be made that such desires are formed, like most others, in the early years.
No, I am more interested here in how self-perceptions come to be, and the difficulty in overturning them once they have been allowed to settle. It is too simplistic to conclude that the revelation of our own beauty - or its opposite - sets us down one path or the other without fail, towards confidence in the self we project, or not. However, the realisation that we are judged on what we present, and that the outcome of that judgement matters, is the end of childhood innocence.
I mentioned before about the eye-patch that was the motif of my own childhood. When you are five years old, the opinion of other five-year-olds matters, and they are inevitably clinical in their assessment. For years, I cursed the broken, ruined eye and asked how things might have been different had I not had to spend my days 'like a pirate'. At an early age, you are already an outsider, already under adult pressures but without the experience or wit to cope with them.
Of course, nothing would have been different: there would have just been some other imperfection to have been highlighted. That is to say, we all get some, every last one of us. I even imagine it possible that a child could be singled out for being too pretty. We all get some, and we all give it back.
Realisation is knowing that we all get some. I had mine. Realisation is knowing that people die, that relationships end, and that it is your own response which decides whether the memory holds you back forever, or whether you can progress in spite of it. As Nietzsche would have it: whether it flourishes in a weak mind, or a strong one.
I say this now because I have a five-year-old friend, the child of a neighbour. He is just learning that he, too, is different in some way, and the tears follow inevitably. This boy is darker-skinned than his peers, and hence they call him chocolate muffin-head. I wish I could tell him we're all different, and hence this makes him unique, unique in his sameness.
You'd get it if you were lighter-skinned, or were taller, or were shorter, or fatter, or thinner, or more intelligent, or more stupid, or older, or younger, or prettier, or uglier, or more talkative, or too quiet, or if you had an eye-patch. From speaking to you, I know you have a quick wit and a sense of humour. I don't know yet whether your mind is weak or strong, though, and it is this which will let you shrug it off in the end, or not.
One day, you will see things for what they are. By then it might be too late, because the mirror throws back disgusting images that don't recede even when you are told by a woman how beautiful you are, and that you'd be precious and worth having even if that wasn't the case. You need to be able to see before the certainty of your own appalling vision fixes itself irreversibly, else it'll be like a fog over everything - a fog that not even genuine, abiding love can lift, at least not for very long.
