A rite of passage is described on Wikipedia as ”cutting away from the former self”. In my red leather-bound dictionary the word passage is described as ”the process of passing from one stage to another”. I think of it as a journey or a giant leap where the outcome or destination is unknown. It’s the story of a butterfly, of transformation. Boldness as well as uncertainty. Beauty as well as fear. I crave change, I want it so desperately, but change is a scary thing. I’m not afraid to jump, of letting go, but I’m afraid of the unknown, of landing in the wrong place. I’m too far away to make out the details, too young to make sense of the big picture. All I know is what I feel. Change is unsettling, unfamiliar. Change is somewhere I’ve never been.
Sometimes I think I need my own Vision Quest, a way to make peace with the changes. Something to guide me along the way, someone to point me in the right direction. You will not grow up to be like him, we are not genetically programmed to become violent, but no one mentions violence around here, it’s too dangerous. What if it triggers a bad memory, what if it upsets someone, what if they start crying? Violence is taboo, it’s the elephant in the room, we talk around it, we ignore it, we don’t talk at all. We’ve never discussed how abuse changes a person, a child, a boy, but we don’t talk about love either, do we? Intimacy. Boundaries. Respect. Nothing important.
