There are few among us who don’t have children in our lives. Maybe we are parents ourselves; maybe we have nieces and nephews. Maybe we don’t have kids ourselves, but teach school or abide in lively neighborhoods or otherwise have kids in our day-to-day experience.
And above and beyond all of these possibilities, without exception – all of us were, at one time or another, children ourselves.
Reasonable adults can agree that most children, most of the time, are amiable creatures, curious and playful and not altogether unpleasant to have around. Most children want the approval of the adults around them – and, by extension, society as a whole.
Most children enjoy, to this degree or that, exploring the world and discovering new things, seeing new sights, learning about living. Most will zero in on what’s fun or interesting or fascinating and drop everything else to investigate.
Most children are not combative, but eager for acceptance; most children are honest, except when at risk of embarrassment; most children present themselves earnestly, wanting to be liked, hoping to be liked for who they are.
That’s most children.
Then there’s that other kid.
You grew up with him. You’ve seen him over and over through the years, at every stage of your youth. You’ll see him today at the mall, or at a ball game. If you’re a schoolteacher, you know he’s there in the lunchroom or on the playground, anywhere other children might congregate (except the library), just as it was when you were young.
He’s easy to find, because he’s always the center of attention. That’s the sum of his world – having everyone’s attention. It is all that matters to him. He’ll do anything – anything – to acquire it and keep it. He’ll break any rule, disrupt any occasion, upset anyone else in the room – anything to get attention. He won’t rest until he has it.
Well, not anything; while many of his peers attract the notice of others through accomplishment – learning to play an instrument very well, mastering a difficult subject, excelling at creating art – he can’t be bothered with such time-consuming pursuits. Attention can be far more quickly and broadly acquired through antics, rather than accomplishment. Painstaking effort is not his style.
You know him by his words, which are loud and constant. He is always braying at the top of his lungs, singing his own praises and demeaning his competitors. He will lie about himself, about others, about adults, about the world at large – about anything, really. It comes very easily to him.
And among those lies will be a never-ending pretense: that he knows everything. Seriously, everything! There is no subject that can come up among the other kids that will not initiate a gushing cascade of bullshit, most of it made up off the top of his head. He says more things that are wrong or made-up than he ever does things that are correct.
But he will never, ever admit error. He is emotionally incapable of saying, ‘Oops, I made a mistake!’ That denial that most every parent sees in their own child, until they gentle it away with loving and patient correction – making it safe for the child to make a mistake and correct it – never goes away in this kid. Since he could walk and talk, he’s been sticking to his story, no matter how outlandish. He doesn’t have the emotional security or maturity to walk back a step and course-correct.
You never knew who he really was, because he never knew; despite having logged some years of life, he never formed a normal identity – or, more precisely, he buried his identity deep, and built his life around pretending he’s someone he isn’t - someone worthy of admiration and adulation and the endless attention and loyalty of others. Somewhere in his pre-adolescent head, these things are equal to love and acceptance.
Such artifice is easily detected – parents and teachers are scathingly adept at this – and so his defenses are fierce. They do not stop at ridicule and insult; he will unpack violence if that’s what keeping his façade intact requires.
You’ll recall that he found himself well-rewarded for his efforts. While most of the kids could see right through him, and the adults in the room could see that he wasn’t just unhealthy to have around but often downright dangerous, there were always a few who looked up to him – who even worshipped him, hungry for the comfort of his shadow, unequipped with the radar to discern his true nature. They looked at him and saw the strength and confidence and expertise and ease with which he navigated the lunch room and the playground – and hoped it might rub off on them.
Eventually these eager sycophants and loyalists moved on to the one who inevitably followed, for another kid like him always follows, and because his entourage leaned so heavily on his shadow and approval, they never learned to step into the sun on their own.
And as for the kid himself, it never mattered that despite the constant cloud of kids around him, he had no friends. He never wanted or needed any.
The adults around us all were constantly aware of that kid. They knew him well; there is one in every school, in almost every class. They constantly called him out, constantly corrected him, constantly took other kids aside to make clear that he was not someone to emulate. He, of course, ignored every call-out, every correction – and took great pains to discredit those adults.
You remember that kid well. You may not remember any of his names, but you’ve encountered him over and over, from a young age, through all your years – that misguided boy who would never grow up, would never embrace self-awareness and responsibility, never bond with others, never nurture a hunger to connect and contribute. That boy who built a universe of lies and disdain, of illusion and fakery, of outlandish claims and immature antics. You’re still encountering him.
You can still find him, of course, at the ballgame or the mall. You can find him in any school, large or small. But you need not look that hard.
You need only pick up a newspaper.
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