Putting my regular feelings for Victor Infante to one side to reprint this moving passage he recently wrote in a tribute to a comatose friend of his (highlighting by me):
"But I keep thinking back to that 16-year-old kid I used to be, and remembering that slow, piecemeal decision to make myself into the person I wanted to be, and realizing that what I'm feeling in that anger is the kid who was hurting a lot from a lifetime of early losses, who didn't know how to stand up for himself and didn't feel he had anything worth standing up for. And sometimes, when the world seems intent on putting you in what it feels is your place, intent on belittling your work and essentially eroding hard-won self-respect, it seems so easy to just lash out again, to start throwing punches. But that's a dead end. I knew it when I was 16, and I know it now. At 16, I found places to put that anger, to make it work for me. And maybe I need to find that again. "Anger," as John Lydon once sang, "is an energy." "
The complete post can be found at http://ocvictor.livejournal.com/868791.html
No comments:
Post a Comment