what it's meant to me: catching a carefree feeling

I can’t quite recall and I can’t quite be bothered to go look it up exactly but earlier in the week I read something along the lines of this: revisit something you loved as a child to feel like your most authentic self.

The thinking, if I’m understanding it all correctly, is that as children we simply love what we love. We aren’t tied down by expectations and we aren’t afraid of feeling inadequate or embarrassed because what we love may be seen by others as uncool. Our ignorance is truly bliss.

Once the rigidness of early adulthood settles in it becomes more difficult to for us give ourselves wholeheartedly to these childhood delights because we are afraid to be judged and possibly ridiculed.

So, we bury them. They become faded. But not gone.

I can still recall the first moment I felt carefree again after losing my mother. Seated ringside at an independent wrestling show that was hosted inside an Elk’s Lodge with my son and a pair of good girlfriends, I had what could be described as an almost out-of-body experience. Suddenly the sound around me felt fuzzy and everything looked as though it were moving in slow motion as I realized I was genuinely smiling for the first time in months. The sensation of having fun had become something I didn’t know much about. As it hit me and I began to grasp what was happening it brought me to tears. Genuine happy tears.

Wrestling and my love for it were a constant throughout my childhood. The first memory I have of loving wrestling is from when I was 9 years old. The family that lived upstairs included a pair of boys who at that time were around 10 and 13, we (the other neighborhood kids and I) had dubbed them the Destroyer Twins. They were rough. And they watched wrestling.

I faintly remember one night climbing the stairs to their apartment that sat above ours. My mother had sent me up ahead of her and as I was about to knock on the door the noise from the TV and the Destroyer Twins brawling startled me so much that I almost retreated home. But in that noise, even at that young age, I could recognize that what I was hearing was pure excitement and I couldn’t turn away.

The year was 1989, the stage was WrestleMania V and I was hooked.

Fast forward back to the fall of 2018 and I had that feeling again. I was surrounded by the excitement and felt as if my mother was close by, on her way to me. For a moment I was safe and carefree once more. Professional wrestling had me feeling like I was home.

My childhood love was buried no more and I felt like my true self again.