I thought everyone had a turning point story.
Call it an inflection point, call it an epiphany, call it the one summer you found a punk rock tape at a thrift store. For me, the basic way for me to understand the basic narrative building blocks of our lives was to look for the moments when we realized that we weren't who we thought we were, or that the world wasn't what we thought it was. Times full of rage and excitement. A peak that we have to come down from to get by in the world, but a peak that is always present, in some core, aspirational memory. Maturing always presents times of alienation.
At least, that is what I thought.
In 2018, I wrote a book. The book was about my subjective experience with American geography, how the natural and human landscape shaped my life. The book exists as a file on my computer's hard drive, and I don't know what to do with it. It needs lots of editing. Writing the book made me realize how my own experience of maturing was related to physical travel, and how geographically seeing areas that were unlike the world of my childhood made me realize the world was different than what I thought it was. Up until the age of 14, despite being fairly aware of the world through reading, my personal experience of the world was still naive. I was mostly transported about in my mother's car, and my life was shopping malls, toys, video games and the like, with the world outside of that horizon being a somewhat unknown territory. I was actually a late bloomer, I didn't really even take the bus by myself until far in my 14th year. But then things started changing with the rapidity of adolescence. I started walking and busing around Portland, in the early 1990s, checking out what would become the Portland scene. At a thrift store in Northwest, I bought a cassette tape of Public Enemy, "Fear of a Black Planet", and started listening to it, and other hip-hop albums. Before that point, I had thought of Hip-Hop only in the broadest stroked stereotypes, and now I was imbibing it, at least as much as I could find of it. Over 1994 and 1995, I built a complex revolutionary mythology around figures as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Ken Kesey, Malcolm X, and Crazy Horse. I also would wander through the Portland area for hours, both in the city itself and out on the many rural roads in the outer suburbs.
I should say that in retrospect, and even at the time, there was parts of this mindset that were naive, perhaps even condescending. I was interested in the struggles of minority groups while living in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a city famous for being high income and very white. I will return to that point in a minute.
After I turned 16, still chasing my own ideas, I got my GED and went to community college, with mixed results. I also graduated to taking intercity buses, basically riding the Greyhound Bus around the Pacific Northwest. I read from a hodgepodge of philosophical and political texts, often going from embracing libertarianism to deep ecology, among others. I would say the final step of my teenage travels was when, at the age of 17, I was at my local community college, and after my boring morning class, I realized I didn't want to stay for my boring afternoon class, so I went to downtown Salem, bought a Greyhound ticket for Phoenix, Arizona, along with some cookies and comic books, made a hasty phone call to my mother, and then got on the bus to meet up with my (18 year old) friend who had moved to Sedona a few weeks previously. The trip also had mixed results. I obviously saw a lot of things, and went a lot of places after that, but this was the end of my teenage arc: it took about three years to go from wanting my mother to drive me to the mall so I could visit the arcade, to managing a cross-country Greyhound bus trip, and to realize just how different people lived in the United States outside of the horizons of Salem, Oregon.
An easy, and accurate, criticism of this to make is that I was using the history and experiences of other people's in a facile and condescending way. That is true. I shouted along to Chuck D while not knowing any real black people*, and imagined revolution while having the safety net of my family to fall back on. And that is why, like I said, these type of turning points are often emotional times that have to be translated into reality. But there is something much worse than having a superficial or unrealistic interest in other cultures or experiences, and that is to not care at all.
And that, for various reasons, is where I am in 2020: I have come to realize that for many people, they didn't even approach this. They didn't have any type of emancipatory or liberational experience as teenagers or young adults. They had brief experiences of transgression, puking on their shoes in the Walmart parking lot, but they had scheduled lives as teenagers, that changed into scheduled lives as adults, and they never had the moments of giddyness, anxiety, discomfort, or exhilaration that to me were basically what changed the protoself of childhood into an adult self. Part of the reason I believe this has to do with the current political situation. People who had any type of foundational experience questioning the world, or wanting the world to be a better place, would not abide with a tacky, ignorant and just plain bad person as the president of the United States. That experience made me reevaluate a lot of my social interactions. Had the many people who evinced no interest in making the world a better place, who I charitably assumed had just had to adjust to sometimes harsh realities of work and family, really just not given a fuck in the first place? Had they really gone through their axial period of life never wanting a larger thrill than warm beer and copping a feel? Did the majority of people have no core experiences of something better that I could appeal to? As the years have ticked by since 2016, I am more and more inclined to think that is the case.
So that is where I have reached. I hope I have not included too many details of my own life, and of my own experiences, which are sometimes admittedly silly.
I am, as a matter of fact, soliciting responses here. This is a personal thing, but if we share our personal stories, we start to see a pattern. So, here, I want people to share their personal stories of transformation, usually as young people, but at whatever age. What, when, why, where and how did it occur? And when it happened, did it feel like something that was unique to you, or did you find it something easy to discuss and share with others? I am eagerly awaiting your replies.