Parents ended up finding out, drove me back to the store to return them and apologize.
I stole baseball cards from my cousin at around the same age and the punk still won’t forgive or talk to me. I think it’s a phase thing for some kids when growing up; part of development of cognitive independence and the absence of reasonable ethics.
I went through a similar thing with atheism when I had to confront what I really believe versus everything I had parroted all of my life, although to a far less interactive and externalized extent.
My father is a toxic level miser, and seeing all of my friends with things I didn’t have really bothered me on some subconscious level where I externalized my cognitive dissonance an tried to even the disparity. It eventually lead to music and guitar as a better outlet for internalizing my rebellion.
Crazy at such a young age right? Yes, that’s awesome you channeled your frustrations into something positive and worth while. Do you still play?
I play occasionally, but it has gotten rare. My back damage is such that I can’t really sit with an acoustic for very long.
:/ no… I understand. Man that blows. I hope your back gets better I’m sure that is rough
I stole baseball cards from my cousin at around the same age and the punk still won’t forgive or talk to me.
Bro seriously harbors an insane grudge, lol… I do not even understand. The guy can’t be healthy.
I went through a similar thing with atheism when I had to confront what I really believe versus everything I had parroted all of my life, although to a far less interactive and externalized extent.
I am increasingly meeting a lot of ex-atheists. I am curious what your experiences are with this…? I do not want to like derail this with me proselytizing or anything, but I ask because I have honsetly spoken to people who have not even joined a religion or anything but eventually found that they felt the universe had a creator.
My father is a toxic level miser, and seeing all of my friends with things I didn’t have really bothered me on some subconscious level where I externalized my cognitive dissonance an tried to even the disparity. It eventually lead to music and guitar as a better outlet for internalizing my rebellion.
I was actually always quite well off - upper quartile income - except for when my father was transitioning between jobs over the course of about 2 -3 years, but these were very formative years for me (right before puberty).
I had learned money was tight, and I started doing things like trying to eat less food, and I suddenly became very conscious of the fact that I might damage my toys and thus lose them because I felt like I could not ask for anything new…
This led to me having profound sympathy for the poor, for one, and for small business owners who are trying to just make it in the chaotic economy… But it also gave me this idea that I should just try to absolutely conserve everythign I have and save money however I can.
As I am on the spectrum, this made me something of a miser, and right now I am doing my best to appear the opposite of that for my daughter’s sake. I know she will one day notice that I am bothered by wasting anything at all, and that I am always counting costs in my head - I think she is too observant and smart to not notice, just like all kids are… But I do my best. I try to show her I do not care at all about buying her or myself the most expensive items on the menu - even though money is not an issue and I can afford it, my whole brain is like “This is just a waste, stop…”
And a whole different part of me is like “Why are you spending so much money on this garbage? It would be so much better to give $10 to a charity than be drinking expensive coffees like this…” And I intellectually and morally understand that to be true, completely so… YET, I do nto want my daughter to have complexes about money like I do, and to spend her life in an imaginary game of saving up & having to justify every single tiny expenditure.
Your dad might have some amount of OCD or something that enhances his miserliness and I imagine he had some life experiences trigger it.
As I age… I have learned that nothing happens in a vacuum, and that is why we need to be extremely sympathetic even with those that have damaged us.
Had some great talks with some close friends yesterday and, of course, you learn that the parents who beat up their kids were beaten 5x worse by their own parents, right, lol. Suffering is a cycle. The hard part is breaking it.
