Nov 6, 2022
Becoming what you are not until you are
Sometimes I imagine myself as a ghost, present yet unseen. Yes, I seem to be still with this death theme. It just occurred to me that maybe it is the time of year with Halloween, All Souls Day and Remembrance Services.
I received an image from my past the other day and like a ghost going back in time I was trying to figure out my 16-year-old self. I had interrupted a local politician while he was being interviewed by a TV crew. My accomplice was a pensioner in his seventies who seemed also aggrieved with the politician.
I struggled initially to reconcile my 16-year-old self with the current version 36 years on. But as I pondered I could see that a few of the traits may still be present.
I had a habit then of hearing a story and parroting it later. I saw the politician as against us. Us being the Protestants of Portadown. How had I become one? Quite simply I had been born into a Protestant family in a place where your identity was either Protestant or Catholic. Just to make it a bit more complex there was a violent conflict occurring over this identity. This meant you could be targeted simply for being identified as another by the other!
That was an intense environment to live in where you feared you could be shot, harmed, or maimed just for being the other to the other. And maybe just to stir it up a bit you didn't have a whole lot in your life as a young teen.
But,
you could
interrupt a politician when he was being interviewed,
you could
tell the headteacher of the other school where she could go when she challenged you,
you could
string a few words together for a TV crew, or a journalist who wanted to write a story about why the place was in such a revolt
you could
tell an MP what you thought of his words or another of his leadership
you could
write letters to the papers
you could
believe that this was the most important thing in your life
until it wasn’t
And then,
you could be yourself
g
