Anne Frank, 1940.
When I write about personal matters, I quickly stumble into one of life’s puzzling ironies: Every one of us is unique, and we’re also part of a collective whole.
Self-awareness essentially means straddling that divide.
This thought came up for me in the past week, when I started doing my best to ignore the news of the day and begin focusing on the details, big and little, of… my own life. Yeah, I’ve decided (at age 78) to start writing a memoir. Maybe now’s the time.
I started wandering through my childhood and adolescence, trying to figure out how I wound up creating the guy now sitting in front of his computer screen, and I quickly started digging through some of the old journal notebooks I have saved, dating back to tenth grade. In my English class that year, one of the books we were assigned to read was The Diary of Anne Frank. To say it had an impact on me is putting it mildly.
My God, she was only 15 when she died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, shortly before the war ended. When I read her diary, I was also 15. There the comparison ends, but I nonetheless felt a compelling need to put something into words about my own life, whatever it was. Did I have an actual life? Or was I just wandering around pointlessly, lost, shy, and inadequate?
I started journaling a number of times over the next year, always abandoning the process after a couple of entries, until, in the midst of my junior year, something clicked. I’ve been journaling most of my life.
Here’s a quote from one of those early stabs at self-awareness, dated March 6, 1962. It begins with this warning: “Property of Bob Koehler: Do not read.”
Well, let’s start reading anyway. I think he might be flattered. Here’s how it begins:
“In English class we are reading the Diary of Anne Frank. Anne says that she started her diary because she did not have a friend with whom to share her innermost thoughts. I also am in want of such a friend. Like Anne, I have ideas, views, outlooks, whatever you want to call them, that I must express to someone. Thus, I create you, but, until I can think of an appropriate name for you I will call you Understanding Friend, U.F. for short.
“Now, if you don’t mind, I would like to pour out my heart to you. I consider myself the most lonely, unhappy and miserably misunderstood creature in the universe…”
Wow, the dawn of self-awareness. Or so it seemed as I started reading my words six-plus decades later. (Can you believe? I still have all these ancient notebooks on a bookshelf in my study.) And I started thinking about the irony of language. A language is a collective means of communication, allowing even personal thoughts to be collective. Words don’t have private meanings. But here I was, using this collective communication process to speak only to myself: to establish myself as a singular entity. The entry continues:
“I do not consider myself unloved, because I have the feeling my parents care for me. I do not consider myself totally unpopular, but I know for certain that I am left out of many activities in which my friends participate. Nor can I entirely blame them. If I could see myself from the outside, I’m not sure if I would like what I saw. I am shy and bashful, especially with girls, and am usually not comfortable in the presence of other people even my own age. I am quite certain I give people the impression I am indifferent to them or bored with them. It is actually just the opposite. I want to say nice things to people, but I simply cannot bring myself to do so.”
Oh life! If growing up, becoming myself, was simply an orderly process, there would be no such thing as self-awareness – which happens in a state of isolation, and it’s often a disconcerting, possibly even, at times, a terrifying phenomenon.
For instance, I can still hear – feel – myself crying in the middle of the night, when I was a little boy. Mom and Dad had gone out somewhere and Sis and I were staying at a relative’s house. I woke up in the middle of the night, crying desperately: Where’s Mom?
These were life-defining tears, a nightmare morphing into real life. Mom in that black sealskin coat, so soft and furry. How I loved the feel of the fur on my face as I hugged her. Mom! Mom! She was loving, caring, smart– a teacher of English and Latin, but now a housewife. I was the oldest child, But during her second pregnancy, when Little Bobby was 2, one of Mom’s sisters, who was a nurse, got infected and wound up dying. Mom had loved her dearly and the impact it had on her was enormous.
After Susie’s birth . . . and mind you, I had no idea whatsoever that anything like this was going on . . . Mom had what would later be called post-partem depression, but at that time, the late ’40s, was simply known as a nervous breakdown. Mom with a newborn and a 2-year-old! She was hospitalized and her family stepped in to save the day. Mom was in the process of receiving electroshock therapy, and several of her sisters moved in to take care of the newborn. Dad had to move out. And I was sent off to live at another sister’s house.
Mind you, these are details I learned from a cousin three-plus decades later. I have no specific memories of any of this. I was just a tiny mushball of a toddler, with zero perspective on what was happening, zero ability to understand anything that might have been “explained” to me. Mom’s family did, I’m certain, their absolute best to handle this chaotic tragedy. I don’t know how long Mom was hospitalized or in recovery, or how long I lived at Aunt Marie’s house.
But the family did reunite and things returned, more or less, to normal – but I was left, you might say, with a hole in my psyche: a looming dark spot, a fear of abandonment that would pop up oh so unexpectedly when I found myself separated from Mom and Dad. I had to grow up around this dark spot, and I did.
And today I nurture it. What else can I do? I am who I am because of it.
