I always reflect on this holiday.
I’ve reflected on it through the music of the time; the dreamy-quality to the pop music on Virgin Fm or whatever station it was.
I’ve reflected on it through the incomparable movie ‘Jurrasic Park’ that set a new precedent for cinematic hedonia before we would be bogged down in the ‘CGI of things’.
I’ve related the happiness to how, as a world society, we were now supposedly in an ‘end of history’ period on lasting peace. liberated from the shackles of the psot.
And connecting all the aformentioned dots with one main driver: I’ve always reflected on it through the fortunes of my own family, of how my dad’s new job as an F.E teacher at the local college was now a game-changer in how I began to percieve the future.
For a long time in adulthood people would ask me about what I liked, where I liked, and what I would like to do with my leisure time (the dreaded ‘leasure’ time). More recently I think people have simply given up on asking me what I’m doing with my life.
Thus I long felt deep shame for responding by saying “the happiest time of my life was a holiday I took in the summer of 1993 as a 9 year old.
When you’re getting grey hairs, and all the other things that make you invisible to youth, and you’re still saying your happiest moment was in when you were 9, surely something has gone wrong?
Long story short: after years of struggle, I am starting to conclude that I am neurodiverse, and I never knew how to be a person in the ways that were given to me.
I don’t want to go into this more, and I’m inbetween this all being conclusive.
Yet it makes sense now that, aged 9, before puberty, before adolesence – before all those specific expectations that I could never live up to – would remain frozen in time as a moment where things felt good.
John B Ledger 