ANEW: Reckoning with My Younger Self
Obsessing About Karma
I was not a nice kid growing up.
“Brian needs to stay home from school today. We just cannot get him to stop being mean to the other kids in his class. He’s particularly mean to his best friend, Vernon, with whom he seems to have a love-hate relationship.”
That was the beginning of my school career. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Turner — whom I truly did love and admire — had it in for me.
“What are y’all feeding him at home?”
The things teachers said to parents back then are very different from today. At one point in our nation’s history, you could paddle or “ruler” a kid. I was that kid. At least once a day, I’d have to stick out my hand, bend it into a downward half-moon shape, and watch as my favorite teacher went to town on my left hand. Usually the left — I still needed my right hand to write.
To say I (or anyone) deserved to be hit would be playing by old rules. But I can say this: violence never transformed me. It just reinforced the chaos.
The long and short of it? I just wasn’t a nice kid. I had a temper. If someone offended me, I might punch them. Vernon — my best friend — was often my target. I saw his name online recently and reached out to say I was sorry. We haven’t connected yet, but I told myself I would do it — finally.
Why was I so angry?
Why did I throw a handful of rocks into a crowd of people, hitting them with so much force it ripped the wig off a substitute teacher — a woman battling cancer?
The answer’s not simple. At home, I was witnessing things I didn’t have language for. I was “dysregulated,” as the behaviorists now say. I knew better — I wasn’t confused about what was right or wrong. I was just full of fury, and it had nowhere to go but out.
No excuses. Just hard truths.
And still — I’ve known kids who went through worse than I did and didn’t turn out angry. So why me?
The shift came slowly. I’m a slow-burn kind of person.
When I got to fourth grade — because my old school only went up to third grade — I made a quiet resolution. I didn’t want to be the kid everyone whispered about: “He’s smart, but mean.”
That year, my teacher, Mrs. Baugh, lost her husband. I remember attending his funeral with the class. I felt a kind of sadness that felt older than I was. She saw something in me. She told me I was smart — not because I could memorize dictionary definitions (though that was the metric at the time), but because she saw through my mess. She gave me a role I didn’t know I needed: the helpful, thoughtful smart guy. Not the angry kid. Not the ticking time bomb.
Thanks to Mrs. Baugh, I took a different path.
My last official fight? That’s a story for another time. But it marked the end of something.
Karma, for me, is not cosmic punishment. It’s not lightning bolts or some grand reckoning.
It’s the long arc of accountability — the work of making peace with your former self, one truth at a time.
And sometimes, karma means picking up the phone to apologize to someone you haven’t seen in decades… even if they don’t pick up.
Curated Listening:
What would whimsy be without a dollop of fun? I loved Boy George and Culture Club’s brand of goofy because they represented a fantastical gender-bending way of looking at the world. I’m not quite sure what the video meant, but “Karma Chameleon” was that loopy way of interpreting (and reinterpreting the Antebellum South). Listen to “Karma Chameleon” HERE.
I can totally relate to this. I was a rage machine until I was about 7. I could be sweet as pie until some kid would violate my emerging web of values and then I’d be ready to rumble. In nursery school, I ended up in the directors office more than once for fighting - embarrassing for me and the director, who was my mother. A friend was over for a play date and we got into it - I slammed him with a door and broke his nose. Not good. My brother, 3 years older, and I would fight regularly. Our punishment? Sit and write what caused the dispute. I could never remember the cause. Maybe it was because I was the youngest of 6 and felt attention deprived. I’m not sure. But somehow by 7 or so, I turned down the dial on outward aggression. And when my father died suddenly when I was 10, my demeanor changed even more - socially adept externally and grieving deeply internally.