Becoming and Unbecoming Who We Are
The Company We Keep, the Influence On Our Lives, and a New-Found Path
While raising a blended family of teenagers, there have been many conversations in this house about carefully choosing the company you keep. The expression, “guilty by association,” has been uttered more times than I can count when truths about situations have come to light, whether there was evidence of wrongdoing or not.
We warn our kids about how spending time with the wrong people can influence them, drag them down, impact the outcome of their lives, and make them answerable not only for their own behavior, but to the actions of those they associate with. We candidly tell them that in due time, they will ”become” who they surround themselves with, and how sometimes we all have to make the decision to cast aside those who do not serve us well. I know through contrite tears and illicit anger that the cautionary words have not fallen on deaf ears, but it seems, at times, that they have descended on unheeding minds.
Bad influences are like dominoes, knocking down one after another.
It’s tough being a teenager and trying to find your place in this world. I was there once, I remember. I remember desiring acceptance wherever I could find it, and having fun while doing so. I also remember getting caught up in questionable situations that could have easily threatened my safety and well-being. Although I was vigilant and remained largely unharmed, I was certainly marked by some of the escapades that I found myself skylarking through and the people I chose to associate myself with, have partnerships with, and eventually, exchange vows with as life progressed.
I have always believed that each person who becomes a part of our lives, whether for a short period of time or a lifetime, was put there for a reason. Each one is there to teach us something, change our perspective, or learn which kinds of people we want to synthesize with. Some find guidance in being aware of this, and others get lost, blending in with the wrong crowd, the unconcerned, reckless ones, negligent of their growth.
We are all an amalgamation of those we have surrounded ourselves with.
Regardless of which direction we take with the individuals we choose, we hold a piece of them within us, the good and the bad. Who we become is an ensemble of each respective character, shaping our beliefs, morals, and standards for life. However, it is not to say that we cannot unbecome who we have become by personal inspection and change when necessary. The fallacious influences on our being do not have to define us indefinitely. We are all free to form our own ethics, rules of conduct, and values.
At age 16, I was in a cataclysmic car accident. Putting my head through a windshield, suffering head trauma and a bruised spinal cord, it devastated my young life and the path towards the future, which was still being paved en route to the great beyond. Endless appointments with the neurologist, a multiplex of physical therapists, and intensive rehabilitation interrupted high school classes for the next two years. My extracurricular activities came to an end, and longtime friendships disintegrated.
I made new friends, ones that aligned with my new lack of direction in life, those who relieved my boredom and physical pain with drugs and alcohol. My path, under construction, was becoming one of cracks, bumps, and intoxicating potholes.
Incapacitation changes people in a myriad of ways, and head trauma vacillates us.
Before my accident, as most teenagers, I liked to go to parties, fill my plastic cup from the keg, and let loose while floundering through self-discovery and investigating human nature, but it didn’t consume my life. Post accident, I lost my give a shit, care for consequences, or governance of my behavior. My new group of friends nourished my carelessness and indulged in poor decision-making, reinforcing my misjudgments, burgeoning bad habits, and ill-considered conduct, thrusting me further down a gradually burrowing rabbit hole.
While my behaviors and substance intake were still relatively mild in comparison to many of them, I was looked at no differently. I was guilty by association, assumed to be a punk, a delinquent, a wrongdoer. My reputation belied my true self, and that true self became lost in the fog that lingered. I began to see myself as a miscreant, rabble-rouser, and apathetic individual, which followed me into college and beyond.
Punk rock clubs, bars, and partying were all I cared about. That was the life I chose, the rabbit hole I settled into. When my mom was killed, at 19 years old, I descended even further, but it was cozy down there at the bottom with my circle of consorts. I could consume to decompress, feel confident, griefless, and alive without judgment. It was the life that accepted me, and it was that darkness that took the darkness away.
Marijuana became an everyday, all-day absorption. LSD exploited my desire for consciousness-raising experiences, eventually impelling my reality to present me with a nightmarish spectacle of fears on a 12-hour bad trip. Though I never touched hallucinogens again, I was regularly in the company of unfortunate souls enduring the purgatory of drug addiction. Dabbling a bit, I harnessed a wiser mind than my cohorts. Even though I surrounded myself with terrible influences, my psychedelic voyage to perdition residually stayed with me for 2 years, motivating me to be cautious.
When I became pregnant with my first child at 23, I had to unbecome that person who had been influenced by irresponsibility, complacency, and escape mechanisms. Someone else’s life depended on it; my son’s. Surprisingly, I had no problem not drinking, not getting high, or putting the cigarettes away for 9 months and then some, while nursing. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t smoke weed again until two decades passed, but it didn’t take long until alcohol reentered my bloodstream. I was a casual drinker then, though, usually partaking only in social situations, or maybe one at home like “normal people”, but as my marriage became delicate and eventually paralyzed by abuse, alcohol became my great escape. I had learned through my past experiences and from the company I kept, that was how to deal with a difficult life. Drown it. A piece of them was with me and consumed with every drink.
As I began thinking about walking away from my marriage that had become more and more toxic through verbal, emotional, and mental abuse, I found myself pregnant again, and once again, unbecame, putting aside the alcohol and letting my contemplation of leaving my marriage behind. I was called by duty to provide my children a balanced life, despite the unsteady sphere of their parents’ affinity for each other that encircled them. I was anchored to this life for my kids, and I would persevere. After all, I had chosen their father as the eternal company I kept.
We moved states and started a new chapter in life that I was relatively optimistic about. However, within a few years, I was well on my way to achieving the label of a functioning alcoholic. I was a good mom, deeply involved in the lives of my children by volunteering in kindergarten classes, coaching soccer, being a Girl Scout leader, and eventually a lacrosse coach, but on the other side of that Mother of the Year medal was the participation award for the other version of me. With a musician for a husband, it was effortless to find that company I liked to keep again, the ones who preoccupied themselves with substance abuse, untethering their desperations through the mix of music and intoxication. And he was right there with me, the vilest influencer, down the rabbit hole. It was, in fact, the very name of the last album he ever put out, lyrically vocalizing our relationship problems, hidden in metaphors and ambiguous verse.
He was a narcissist, and the abuse only got worse. The manipulation was severe. I rebelled when I “shouldn’t have”, taking part in my own uprising of spiteful, abandoned behaviors, disobeying his control of me in an attempt to reclaim some of it for myself. The compass of abuse spun turbulently. The crushing of my soul, absolute. I finally left him and had to decisively unbecome for the final time. I had to allow my core self to rise like a Phoenix from the ashes, free from all that had incinerated me.
I got sober and haven’t touched a drink in almost 6 years. I unbecame an addict. My mental health took a leap off a mountainous cliff without alcohol, and I am still climbing back up, enduring the discomfort that my strength to hold on hides behind. With a diagnosis of complex PTSD, I got help, the bravest thing I have ever done. I had to unbecome the crippled me he had convinced me I was and break the broken emotional cage he had kept me in. I fought off stigmas, battled the personal demons that told me I couldn’t do it, and discovered the me that had been suppressed for so long. My only regret is not doing it sooner and regarding myself as the most important company I kept.
My daughter and stepdaughter are only a year apart, 19 and 18 now, respectively. High school during and in the wake of the COVID pandemic, which hammered substantial changes in society, found them both vulnerable to disordered adjustments, not only in themselves, but in the reactive instability of some of their friends. The upheaval of their collective social lives did not manifest in positive or favorable behaviors for many of them.
While spending time hanging in hammocks with friends as the only thing they could do, my daughter began vaping and was introduced to the easily accessible THC vapes that began circulating in their boredom and angst. She deviated, spending time with her friends who were following a path of risky and reckless behaviors. I used myself as an example, telling her my stories, expressing how easy it was for that path to become treacherous, unpredictable, and detrimental to the well-being of her future self. She regarded my words, and while watching her friends slip into a life of drugs, casual sex, and vulnerable situations, she found her inner sensibility and force of resistance to walk away.
Those people who had influenced my life had now served a purpose. They provided me with fainthearted stories that I could tell as a mother, directing my daughter to make smart decisions and take warning of the company she kept. She unbcame what she was becoming before it was too late to form regrets and denegation. Maturing exceptionally and growing as a person, she looks through a different lens now, having learned from her mistakes in judgment, and discerning who she will let into her life.
While my daughter was unbecoming, my stepdaughter began to lose her footing, her balancing act faltering to the downside, and going to extremes with unacceptable behavior. Like me, and heedless of the same stories I told my daughter, she lost her give a shit and became careless of consequences. She found her acceptance in the wrong crowd, and it began changing who she was on a drastic level. It was apparent to all of us who knew and loved her. Binge drinking, having her personal property stolen while passed out, coming home with bruises from falling, and reverberations from the authorities. She was inseparable from her best friend, who had grown into the most unmindful and reckless of girls, whose mother, as we would find out, would supply them with alcohol, weed, and an open door to corruption. We forbid her from spending time there and put strict limits on her time allowable outside of home; a grounding without fully depriving her of the social life she had once already lost.
In that time, another fallen domino bottom began idling with her bestie, who now, even at 18, has no job, no driver's license, and takes advantage of people so that she doesn’t have to take any responsibility for herself. Once free from her requisite confinement, hopeful that those friends would recede from thought, like a magnet, she was drawn right back to them, but also in that time, some new friends started coming around. Ones with maturity, level heads, and good judgment. Depending on which ones she spent time with, she changed who she is outwardly, even at home; a testament to how influence can be overpowering in some.
Grateful, now, that my stepdaughter has found some wisdom and direction to look at her future and begin to unbecome, despite still keeping the bad company of the misdirected girls, she has kept away from the more serious trouble that the two have recently found themselves in. Just last weekend, in her absence, these two undisciplined homegirls jumped a 17-year-old in a gas station parking lot, and as of today, they sit in jail for assault of a minor after being forced to turn themselves in. This was not their first blunder involving the police. All three of the girls’ names came up in a different case that was being investigated
But she didn’t end up there with them. We are watching her unbecome, even if her awareness is coming later, and the process has been sluggish. She is registered for classes at the tech school and moving forward. Always a workaholic, she purchased her first “new car” with the money she was able to save. She truly does have a good head on her shoulders and is a compassionate person inside. That’s the her that we were afraid of losing to negative influence and a game of dominoes that she could not win.
The passageway to adulthood for both my daughter and stepdaughter came to a fork in the road, each choosing a different path. The pressure of acceptance within uncontrollable circumstances gave rise to unhealthy influences for them both; the horsepower behind the drive of these influences took them down divergent paths based on perspective, the presence or absence of scrupulousness and self-regulation, and the governance of their conduct that was chosen.
Choices matter. The company we keep matters. And we can all unbecome.
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