Imposing Meaning on the Past

As I have gotten older, I have been put into more and more situations that require me to reflect on my life: from retreats to leadership seminars, I am asked to look into my past and think about that has happened.  Because I am only 21 years old, the majority of my life has been in the haze of childhood and adolescence, where we tend to act without thinking much about the underlying meaning of our actions.  When we mature, we are able to look back at our lives with a different lens of experience and find new meaning in what we saw and felt.

            On my twenty-first birthday, I went to the DMV and then out to lunch with my mom because my friends from home went back to classes at their different schools on that day.  I spent some of the evening wondering how the heck I got to be so old when I sometimes still feel like I am 12 years old.  This led me to realize that I was 12 nearly ten years ago; so where was I in life exactly ten years ago? That was nearly half a lifetime- it is a huge percentage of my life.

            Then, after a moment of consideration, the hard realization hit me: ten years ago, I was 11 years old, and I was contemplating suicide.  I was bullied by my classmates, and I felt like I had lost all of the friends I had known since I was in preschool.  Being at a school with only 45 students in the grade, I felt like I had no one else to turn to.  I was in a very bad place mentally, and I did not see much of a future for myself at the time.  This continued until I was 14, when I met a girl who went to the high school my parents wanted me to attend.  She told me about being involved with theater and all of the wonderful people she met through it.  Now that I have gotten older, I realized that she had a huge impact on my life without even knowing it.  Just hearing her talk about something that could be in my future gave me a new sense of hope, and helped me see the possible value of living long enough to go to high school.  At the time, I did not necessarily interpret her actions as life-saving, but I am able to see their value now.  I am also able to see how these experiences have contributed to the manner in which I interact with people today.  What is striking about this is the fact  I am almost imposing my own meaning on the events of my life, making sense of what I can in relation to what I have learned afterward.

            Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic not only provides a coming of age story of the author’s own childhood, but also incorporates her own reflections as an adult.  The story begins with an image of Bechdel playing airplane with her father.  Imposed over the image is text recounting the myth of Icarus that says, “In our particular reenactment of the mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky” (Bechdel 4).  This sort of insight is not something that the average child would think about, especially not while playing a game with her father.  The awareness of mortality suggests that this must come from a more mature speaker than the small girl pictured. She is also incorporating knowledge of events that have not yet occurred, which means that the book is narrated in a reflective manner.  Revealing that her father will die may seem like a spoiler, but in this case it serves to help set the tone for the book: this will not be a happy family story. A shadow of loss will loom over the reader as they experience it.

            Bechdel also explores the different ways in which she has responded to difficult situations in her life.  She notes that her handling of her father’s death had transformed over time. For example, she notes, “For years after my father’s death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation I would relate the information in a flat, matter of fact tone…My dad’s dead. He jumped in front of a truck….Eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me” (Bechdel 75).  She condensed a series of situations into one image that communicated the experience that she likely lived out multiple times.  Her reflection also points to the idea that she understands the motivations of her actions more clearly in reflection than she may have at the time.  I find it hard to believe that someone would be that calculated in relaying the death of their parents, but I suppose I may be wrong.