How old were you when you first realized that no adult has any idea what they're doing? When you're a kid, it's easy to look up to your parents and teachers and bank tellers and taxi drivers like they have all the secrets about how to get by in the world -- but the truth is nobody's got a clue.
"I never felt safe enough to come out," John says on this week's episode. his religious upbringing made coming out a painful experience -- his mother broke down and cried, and that very same night he called called a girl he knew to ask if she'd be his girlfriend in the hopes of undoing his mom's pain.
The next few years were hard, and marked by occasional attempts to run away. John would look at his mom, who was once his best friend, and think, "my mom doesn't love me as much as she did."
"More than anything, I wanted my mom to look at me the way she did before," he said.
Finally, he was old enough to move out of the house for real -- but being on his own turned out to be harder than he thought. Two years of couch-surfing and unsteady employment convinced John that he'd failed as an adult.
But his eyes were opened by a chance re-discovery of a movie he loved as a kid, and a lesson he'd forgotten as he grew up: that making mistakes is a very adult thing to do. The movie Matilda showed him that just because a person is an adult doesn't mean that they're right about everything. His past mistakes didn't make him a bad person; and his mother's disapproval could maybe change. "Maybe one day I can pull her out of it," he thought.
John moved back home and attempted a reconciliation that stretched out over years. He wasn't sure if it was working, until one day his mother unexpectedly found a way to let him know that ever since she pushed him away, she'd been silently holding onto a lot of regrets.
A few clips of things we talked about this week:
Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/