I grew up 5km from the nearest shops, just outside of a charming small town that was just outside the suburbia of a city that was not yet metropolitan. We lived on an acre block in semi-rural surrounds in an area that was a cheap way for working class families to build a house.
It was carefree in many ways. It was also intense with young boy bullying hierarchies and sibling rivalries. Parenting was not very supervised in this era, my dad was mostly too busy setting up a business, and my young mum with little life experience and lacking self confidence did not know how to manage us, so we were mostly left to our own devices, with our own child hierarchies, doing what kids do, arguing, fighting, climbing trees, kicking balls, riding bikes, using the swing out and swimming in the river, playing sports, throwing rocks at each other, using slingshots to fire marbles (sometimes at neighbours roofs), skateboarding, making skate ramps, playing ball sports in suburbia, often poor outer city housing commission estates where the sporting field was the centre of the government housing neightbour, working out and so on. I had a penchant for sports, and was training 5-6 days a week from the age of 7 and did quite well at it competing at the state and national level.
Sports taught me resilience and discipline, and empowered me with confidence, and gave me strength to resist bullying. At the young age of nine our athletics training was ahead of the time and would lie down in a dark room on the floor on our backs and do relaxation visualisation scripts as tools for framing our mindset right to be prepared for competition. Our dad also gave us a book to read on will power where a guy explained he would burn his finger to the bone to test his will power, so we vainly and lamely were introduced to some mindless brainwashing of improving our will power through toughness and fitness tests. At age 10 and on my brother and I would go with our coach to the university sports science department and do tests on a tread mill with our oxygen and heart rate monitored and so on and push ourselves hard with our heart rate over 200 beats per minute before we stopped.
The bullying gave me a lot of fear and trauma and that made me daring to face it and tough. Over the teenage years I twice got badly beaten fighting a bully that was 20-45 kg heavier than me. Being a small town it was like a main event, we met at the park at an agreed time with a big crowd of bored local idiots that we were and I got the lesson of a good beat down with public humiliation. Nevertheless there was some sort of dignity in the flogging and after this moment I was not bullied again by the victor and they would even give me some sort of eye contact head acknowledge that seemed to show respect for being the counterparty. Nevertheless these people were cunts and I always had a defiance for bullies.
My dad and coached seemed to get more satisfaction than me when I was on the athletics competition winners dais, I felt a bit shy about it and started to see the vanity of doing sport for the glory of winning. I did quite well at school, especially at maths, but did not resonate with being one of the school nerds.
From a young age it was some sort of ideal to be ‘smart’ and also do be fit and strong. Like most young people I have a limited view on what to be ‘smart’ meant, and assumed it meant to be good at maths or something like that.
My hometown was a beautiful place until my teens when the heart thought something was missing, although I did not have enough culture to realise my latent curiosities for the world were making me bored in a cultural desert.
Training was becoming a chore, and winning for winning sake had lost a bit of meaning to me. In addition I hit puberty late so guys that were not athletes two years earlier started winning athletics competition just because they grew into a man quicker and could grow a solid beard. I was no longer training as much to be a high level sporting champion, and didn’t see glory on the winning dais for my coach and parents greater satisfaction as a worthy pursuit and in the later teenage years slowly I started to get disaffected with school and authority.
At the same time was starting to be repelled by a lot of the myopic small town conformity and bullying culture, a culture where at “party” seemed to be a bunch of young people getting drunk and having a fight, and where being smart should be shamed.
At age 15 I did a skydive as a dare to my dad who rubbished that I would not have the courage to do it as he didn’t. I had never heard of skydiving prior to this dare and hence had not thought about how it would play out. Coincidentally on the same day I accepted the dare we went as a family and watched the movie Point Break at the cinema. There was enough exaggerated and protracted skydiving drama in the film with mindless comments about “you pull (the ripcord) first” scenes that I was restless all night and even more scared shitless about accepting the dare. When I was 18 and after I had left high school I had motivation to go and do a skydiving course and jump solo, as the tandem did not seem like a full accomplishment.
By the end of high school I hated the small town and small town mentality and could not wait to get the fuck out of there and any new direction in life was a step forward as long as it did not take me back to the social bubble of mediocrity that I had surrounded myself in. I guess you could call it a calling, or that I had bigger fish to fry. It was time to move the fuck on.