Uncomfortably Alive.
Wake-Up Call #10
1982.
I ease down the steps into a smokey, underground lair, fresh from a gymnastics meet.
Just swapped creased white tights with toe-caps, suspenders, and a royal blue tank-top leotard for a washed-out green and blue flannel shirt, threadbare bandana, puka beads, blown-out jeans, and bare feet.
Kicking back on the crumbling remains of a futon, a stray candle struggles to illuminate the paint-and-clay-spattered concrete. Friends drape the room.
My eyes close for a moment as my head relaxes back. Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb swims in my ears, dropping me into another world.
I love the feel of the song. To this day, the transcendent vocals, soaring guitar and effervescent chorus transport me to a time when everything, every option lay before me. The world was expansive and inviting, mine to paint and build and play and make.
I didn’t care what the song was about. Never parsed the lyrics. I just knew it took me somewhere.
But, the words. Those words. Forty years later. Land so differently.
There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb.
The last three lines. They make me incredibly sad.
They’re not just a callback to a season of adolescent bliss. They describe a widespread, profoundly bleak state of adulthood defined not by passion, connection, and presence, but by estrangement, futility and the evisceration of hope.
The child is grown.
The implication is not that it’s still there, but access has grown harder. Its that it no longer exists. It was just a phase. Along with that went easy passage back to that youthful state of kinetic bliss, wonder, and possibility. Snuffed out by an unavoidable conspiracy of the mundane called adulting.
The dream is gone.
That, too, subsumed by a reality that requires us to leave awe and hope, possibility and play behind. Summarily dismissed as irrational, fictional even, no longer worthy of pursuit by reasonable, responsible grown-ups.
And, so, we walk away.
The child. Poof. Gone.
The dream. Poof. Gone.
Outgrown.
Delivering the balance of life into a pathology of loss and monotony that leads, inevitably, to pain. Suffering born of denial. A refusal to acknowledge an uncomfortable reality.
And, that final line.
I have become comfortably numb.
We can’t take the fact that we’ve buried the kid and the dream, the parts of us that keep wanting to emerge and take the lead. Scrapping and screaming, just beneath the surface, “not dead yet!”
So, we just stop feeling. The alternative hurts too much.
In the quest to treat the symptoms of modern-day adulthood, we numb ourselves with a PIC line of pharmaceutical-grade busyness, compartmentalization, and denial.
One that insulates us from the sadness of a life that values propriety, order and the illusion of security over the lightness of expression, connection, and possibility.
We don’t even realize it, until we feel like it’s too late.
It’s just so easy it is to slip into a life of quiet resignation, medicated by pace.
Thing is…
The child, in fact, never died. Nor did the dream.
They’re still there, always were. A part of us. Locked away, smuggled into silence by an acceptance-seeking psyche that refuses to let these possibility-fueled parts of our composite humanity step back into a place of prominence. Tamed and shamed into oblivion by the desire to make peace with cultural and familial norms.
Maybe it’s time for a resurrection of the dream. And a reclamation of the child.
Maybe it’s time to pull out a chair for that inner kid to return to at the table of our lives. Bring with it a capacity for wonder and awe, hope and vision we thought we’d surrender to the past.
Might that make us a little bit weird, maybe not fit in quite as easily in our old communities or families of origin? Will it make us uncomfortable?
Likely, so. But…
I’d rather be uncomfortably alive, than comfortably numb.
You?
Wake-Up Call #10:
What were the most magical parts of 9-year-old you?
When no one else was judging or shaming or you tame your essence, who were you?
What did you love?
How did you show up when you were most you?
What did you dream about being, doing, or becoming?
How might you let even the tiniest sliver of that part of you back into the way you move through life today?
If you’re open to it, share in the comments…
When I was nine years-old, I played Wendy Darling in the 4th grade production of Peter Pan at PS 41 in Greenwich Village. I remember jumped from the stage with my umbrella and really thinking I could fly.
If I were to bring a sliver of that back, I would let myself be seen more again. Still be considerate, but not at the cost of hiding myself.
I love this so much, Jonathan, thank you: "I’d rather be uncomfortably alive, than comfortably numb."
When I was 9, I felt unapologetically free, riding around on my Banana Bike. The world was not simple, I knew, but riding along, fast and slow, into new and old neighbourhoods, on my own, and sometimes with my brother, I felt free. So free. Now, almost 50 years later, I am starting to feel that unapologetic freedom again, crafting a life of my own, uncomfortably alive, not comfortably numb. <3