Beware of Darkness*

Like most kids, I was afraid of the dark. I’d check under my bed for all kinds of monsters; sometimes, I’d also check the closet. But I also remembering debating with myself whether it was worth the risk to get out of bed and cross the room to look into my closet, given that if something was under my bed, it certainly would get me in the process.

This dilemma tended to freeze me in place, pondering unsavory alternatives.

Growing up required giving up all kinds of fantasies, including these fears, since as it turned out, no monsters ever showed up – at least not the ones I’d imagined. The demons were figments of my imagination.

Eventually, however, I grew to realize that a lot of the things and people around me were figments of my imagination. There was an entire set of sports leagues I invented, each team with a distinct roster. I kept stats for everyone, and “published” news reports analyzing each day’s results. Some of my “leagues” persisted for years, so that I’d compiled 50 “seasons” of records or more.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit I only recognized how compulsive this behavior was in my 40’s. Even as an adult, I continued to play these imaginary games, almost any time I got bored. When I finally let them go, it was a relief, actually. It was about the same time I recognized how shy I had been all of my life.

My strategies for fighting shyness included pushing myself into socially uncomfortable situations, like going to parties where I knew no one; or giving public speeches before ever larger crowds. By the time I was 50, I no longer considered myself shy. And I wasn’t.

I like to tell my little kids these stories, whenever they tell me they feel shy or that they have fears about monsters and other evildoers. Ten-year-old Dylan has recently developed a compulsion to double-check that all of the doors in the house are locked before he goes to bed.

He can’t really explain why, but it seems related to another of his decisions – to stop watching any scary movies or read scary books. It’s that problem of having too active an imagination, I believe. He may be a bit like me in that way.

Still, we all know that bad things can and will happen in life. Pretty much everything ends badly. Relationships break up, jobs get lost, friends disappear, favorite things break or get lost, ultimately we all lose our lives. So almost everything ends badly.

The question is not how it’s going to turn out – we’re all toast in the end – but what the next step will be. You meet somebody, you like her or him, a relationship forms, it escalates to intimacy, and all of a sudden you’ve got a brand new entity in this world, as captured by the equation (1+1=3), i.e., you, me, and our relationship.

So when you break up, you not only lose your partner, and you also lose that third entity, your intimate relationship. Right away, you’ve lost two-thirds of what you’ve had.

The real problem comes when you realize this isn’t the end of a process, it’s the beginning. Because, all too often, the next stage is you start to lose the one thing you have left -- yourself. For me, that is when I start to question whether the “us” ever really existed at all. Maybe our relationship had only been a figment of my still over-active imagination.

So watch out. For just like in baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Then, it’s time for you to take yourself out of the game altogether.

*George Harrison