Life in the Hideout

                     

As I got into my teen years, things got more complicated.  
My family came apart, and I went to live with my grandparents for a few years.  It was a blessing that I had been praying for, and a chance to see what other ideas life could hold.

You can read more about this in my book, Prevail. 

For now, I want to talk about what that time was like.  It was a time of intense turmoil for me, and for the whole country, late in the 1960s.  There seemed to be nowhere to go that would be safe from the craziness we all were experiencing.  

I was an uprooted person, with no clear idea of who I wanted to be.  The chance to reinvent myself was not lost on me, so I created an identity that was something to hide behind, telling nobody what I was really thinking or feeling.  A photo of me from that time shows the deep distrust I felt for everything that moved.  

Yet I projected a sunny and even silly picture of myself, made the effort to get good grades, and gathered people around me who supported me in different ways. I got involved in "the scene", got in trouble, got on probation.  My options became more limited, as I struggled to keep up with all the things that I needed to do.   I kept up with my school work, went to church, went out to shows with the local band, breaking the ice on the dance floor to get people moving.

I took a lot of writing classes, and had reading and writing homework every night that was huge.  For one class alone I had to write at least five pages a day, read and critique magazines, study the ancient masters of rhetoric, and more, with additional books being assigned to be read and reviewed.  

That teacher, who was about to retire, shaped me in ways I didn't understand for decades.  She was both loving and ruthless.  She read and reviewed every word, and if you presented a false or indefensible premise, she would rip it apart in a phrase or two.  I loved and feared her as the towering intellect that she was.  To this day, I can feel her words in my heart.  I remember how she impressed upon us the power of words, and the responsibility that comes with knowing how to use them.  She gave us amazing tools, and warned us of the consequences to our souls if we abused them.  She was VERY serious about it!  I realize now that she was especially strict with me because she knew that I had a lot of conflict in my heart, and wanted to be sure I got it right.  There was no fooling her.  She had seen it all.

After high school, I was so fed up with "the system" that I dropped out of society, which was thought to be a good idea by some.  The idea appealed to me, to my sense of adventure, to my desire to escape.  I hit the road, traveling around to different places in different ways, finding out quickly that the life I had envisioned of a happy bohemian existence wasn't anywhere close to the reality of that.  

The hippie dream had ended just before I joined, and the craziness I fell into was far more intense than I was able to cope with at the age of 17.  I think back on it, and have to say that I was at least brave, to the point of being foolhardy in many cases.  Amazingly, I survived some truly insane situations.

One thing led to another, and I found myself in Big Sur, where I didn't expect to stay long.  Wrong again.  I have been here for 45 years as of this writing.  For a while, I didn't write. Things got too difficult, and it took everything I had to cope with the situations I found myself in.

Then I began to write again, on a different scale, and for far different reasons.

I'll tell you more about how that happened, how it felt, what I did about it, in another post...it's "another story".  Want to hear more about the forces I dealt with, and the insights I gained from them?

Read        Prevail: Seven Keys to Create a Personal Victory