Redheaded Jill

As I’ve written several times, I go to therapy. Twice a month, I talk to my shrink, and we dive into things that happened in my childhood, things people have told me growing up that make me or made me have a really negative view of myself. Sometimes those things are said by my loved ones, sometimes they’re said by total strangers. You really never know what kind of stuff a kid is going to internalize and make part of their core identity.

Last week I was at the lake with my best friend and we were peacefully floating by ourselves in a little isolated section. It was just us and the fish.

Unfortunately, in the middle of our grounding session, some teenage boys showed up with their fishing poles. They were loud, they thought they were pretty cool, they joked about jumping in the water. After a few minutes they left, and we thought we were in the clear, but they quickly returned.

The place we swim is next to a shed, and one of the boys climbed on top of the shed and wanted to jump in the water. He asked us how deep it was and we told him it was about 3 feet. if he did what he was joking about he would probably break his neck or be paralyzed. I was NOT kind about it, my authoritative teacher voice turned on and I was pretty aggressive sounding.

Thankfully, they chose to jump off the dock instead, which was a good distance away. First, all I could think was that they were a bunch of idiots. They kept cursing, being super loud. I thought they were just stupid.

I was stewing about it later, and I started to feel really bad. It was important that this kid not jump off the roof of a shed and hurt himself by diving in the super shallow water. It was that I did not need to yell at him in the nasty way I did. There was a Nicer way to explain to them how shallow the water was, we could’ve directed them to a different part of the lake where the water was deeper and it was more zoned for people to get in.

I thought to myself, I am in therapy for all the times strangers said things to me that made me feel really small and worthless to help me through it. Why would I do that to someone else?

Maybe this group of teenage boys is well adjusted and they don’t care about what some random lady at the lake told them when they were trying to have a good time. I pray it’s not an interaction that has damaged his sense of self worth.