While I was prepping for an article that I have to write on this year's Super Bowl commercials, I had mindless TV on in the background -- I've never been able to work in quiet -- and stopped when a clip from Live Aid was shown. 1985 celebrity philanthropy at its finest with mullets all over the place (Bono's was particularly glorious) and everyone on stage dressed in five layers even though it was the middle of July.
When Live Aid happened, I was 17. I took a second to consider what I remembered about the day that Live Aid happened. There wasn't a ton -- I was living in the middle of nowhere without cable so I remember both listening on the radio and watching whoever was carrying the MTV feed over the air. The only strong memory that I have is trying to time leaving the house to go meet up with a couple of buddies so that I was getting ready during an act that I didn't care about.
That's not what stood out about the memory. No, what caught me was that shot of my teenaged self. See, I was truly obnoxious. I know, I know... all teenagers are obnoxious, but I was pretty bad. Like a lot teens, I attempted to turn anger into an art form. Even my closest friends found my surliness annoying. The part that seems mindboggling now, though, is just how confident I was. Again, young men have a way of being over-confident and I took full advantage of society's forgiveness of that particular sin.
Sitting here now as a guy in his 40s whose career never quite reached the level of success that my younger self very much expected, the difference between the two versions of me is jarring. I don't know that I have zero confidence, but my cup in that regard is definitely overflowing.
Of course, the confidence that I had as a young man was a fallacy. It was just meant to cover up the fact that I usually didn't know what the hell I was doing. Even before my father died when I was 7, I think I was aware that I didn't particularly want to be like the people around me, as I shuffled around to bars and race tracks as a toddler.
So, I spent my childhood learning how to bluff my way through situations. I would play dumb when I felt that was what would work. If I decided that I had something to say, I learned early on that it was best to sound like I knew what I was talking about whether I did or not. I developed a deadpan delivery so that I could say anything and leave people wondering whether I was serious or not. I also decided that glaring a lot was a good way to get people not to question me.
I don't think that actually makes me much different than plenty of other people, but what I did learn was different was that I didn't really have an underpinning of core values that I had learned -- good or bad. I had tried to develop my own as a child and, it turns out, that doesn't really work that well. So, at some point, I started seeking that, latching onto other families that I thought displayed the kinds of values that I wanted. That did work, but it also always left me unsure which to follow -- my instincts or what I had learned environmentally.
The positive is that I didn't end up spiraling into substance abuse and unleashing the bipolar issues that run in my bloodlines. The downside, is that in trying to use blustering confidence to see me through, I didn't know how to handle the bouts of failure that invariably hit you. At some point, I just stopped trusting my own processes, and that confidence of youth slowly slipped away.
It happens, and the fact is that my life has never been particularly bad, no matter what my confidence level might be at anyone time. It is still a bit weird to be confronted with that difference. Out of my sons, Casey is the one who most closely resembles me when I was younger. While I had my father's death that caused me to alter my outlook at an early age, he had his parent's divorce.
Casey is sure that he knows what's best, even when it's clear that he doesn't. That doesn't affect him, either... he has a very Republican knack for turning the facts around to suit his needs. It leaves me with a conundrum, however: do I want to see what he can do with that level of confidence and a background of solid values that he's been taught by his family or do I need to make sure that he knows how to admit defeat when that's called for? Or, is it some balance between the two.
Luckily, he's not even 12 yet, so I've still got a little time to figure that out. Maybe I'll even rediscover some of my own lost confidence as I try to guide him.
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