What is it about kids and wall sockets? Come on, I can’t have been the only one. The only youngling hypnotised by two forbidden holes the perfect size for my fingers, the promise of the power just beyond them captivating, daring me to reach, to push on past the nagging of my parents and the socket covers they eventually installed which were so easy to remove that they more often added to its thrill than helped to discourage my hunt. My first explanation for this phenomenon was some sort of fascination with fear. In the preface to his short story collection Night Shift, Stephen King posits that the reason horror media is so popular is our deep-seated obsession with our own deaths. Viewed through this lens, good horror fiction functions as “rehearsal for our own deaths”. Though I much like King’s theory, this feels like a more sophisticated sort of obsession, out of reach for the average toddler. More primal, and more likely, is a fascination with power. With the pure electric death coursing just behind that flimsy piece of plastic. There is, indeed, something to be said about the beauty of power. It’s the quintessence of bodybuilding, monster trucking, big game hunting, and other such extreme endeavours whose participants, despite significant risk to their person or others, and the stigma often lurking in the background, still engage in them, even dedicate their lives to them. Reaching for power is dangerous. Lucky for us that our parents were there to stop us. But what about after? What about now? What happens when we reach adulthood, and it stops being another’s duty to protect us from ourselves? The last few years have taught me that we don’t grow up. Not automatically. It takes a short walk in the park or through a busy metro station to notice them: the middle-aged still-dream-of-rappers, the mothers scrolling down their tailored feeds whose babies scream for all but them to hear, the angry men, the TikTok divas, drama queens, pot-bellied still-bullies and lawmen drunk on power. It seems to me that growing up, like anything worth having in this life, is the result of a deliberate process. It’s hard work. I also think that, at its core, it's a defence mechanism. A shield against the scammers and the criminals, the heartache and the disappointments of the world, but also against someone far more dangerous: the person in the mirror. Growing up, we learn to curb our power lust, our jealousy and ennui and our desire to see beautiful things burn down only to gain the opportunity to build them up again ourselves. We slowly come to better understand ourselves, our fortes and our shortcomings, the things that drive us on or block us in our path, our patterns of behaviour and thought, the way we lie to make ourselves feel better (or worse). We get to know our enemy so well we can predict their every move. And then, ideally, we move on. We start seeing past ourselves, to the people around us. To our community. We see the way we all connect to something larger, beyond human but so very human. Something like love, the present moment, or stories. We begin to cherish this new discovery, make a mission out of its protection. Ideally. But some of us never get there. It isn’t easy, trying to move beyond ourselves. Not in this day and age, when we don’t own our cars and houses and can barely think our way past this week’s war, when personality is everything we can depend on. But I think we owe it to ourselves to do much more for the person in the mirror than apply a filter to their face. Because the kid who stuck her fingers in that wall socket could be the girl losing her life in the next motorcycle accident. All because she wasn’t able to control her fascination with power. Because she wanted to own it, she wanted to own it, she wanted to own it.
From the archives:
No Mayonnaise, Please! - The weird things we do to belong.
The Wrong Family - On all the pets that got away.