Surviving the American dream: A primer

Abstaining from being a perpetrator: the ultimate Fountain of Youth

2024 was the year I turned 60. Thirty years ago, the milestone was liberating, 40 reflective, and 50 was explosively celebratory. Sixty, on the other hand, has been a little sobering. The numeric grace between ‘now and dead’ has noticeably shortened.

Sixty is also a synonym for seniorhood, a time when many look back on those all-important accomplishments. Like any number, 60 is an aggregate…and what it contains is a mix of choices and fate. Milestones invariably bring with them assessments. Maybe it’s not such a great idea to get out the magnifying glass for a detailed inventory, because I feel there should be more ‘accomplishments’ at this stage of my life - but by whose standards?

I’m childless by choice, didn’t marry until late in life, and despite an iron-solid work ethic, have never qualified for an AmEx gold card. It all begs the question: How would we view our lives without the raised eyebrows of the ‘shoulds’ and the limit-inducing fences of modern conventionality?

Anyway, my accomplishments don’t center around accruing the trappings of the American Dream; my existential trophies are from surviving it.

Although it isn’t embryonically new information, it’s still worth pointing out there are a few flaws in this so-called dream - starting with the fact that these nuclear families everyone is so keen on replicating aren’t always as happy as they seem.

Take those wince-inducing Olan Mills portraits. They’re usually riddled with faces burdened with trying to evoke a genuine smile in unison. The strain behind my mother’s eyes in our 1980 family portrait became too much to bear; I removed it from my scrapbook years ago. It was enough to live through what went on when the camera wasn’t clicking. Broken-intact families are epidemic, so let’s not look the other way anymore, shall we?

My mother stayed with my father and kept the family intact, most likely because of that paralyzing human condition called fear of the unknown. We probably would have suffered either way, but how things might have shifted, even a little, if she had taken a stand against his madness: Lavishing luxuries on himself while stealing his children’s summer job money; the demeaning labels he spat out that edified my self-hatred; looking the other way when I was bullied at school, mandatory 500 calorie-a-day diets - always followed by his duplicitous encouragement of abandoning the rigor when he couldn’t take it anymore and binge-eating with him.

I was the first in line: the oldest, and the would-be example, which my mother and father liked to remind me I failed at. I survived mayhem and insanity. Is that not accomplishment enough?

I learned from it - delved, with professional help, into the mess, sorted it out, and became proficient at healing the wounds - because I was determined not to become an abuser myself. Is that not an achievement to be proud of? But it looks rather out of place on the checklist of life that’s rattled off in obituaries: Spent reproductive years recovering from childhood – CHECK!

My innocence was taken from me at a very young age. I can cut the bullies a little slack because they were fulfilling their job description. But friends and blood relations who took pleasure in embarrassing and belittling me left an imprint far more damaging than the insecure bastard on the school bus. Shut-down became my default response and I spent years barely speaking, let alone trusting another person.

What I’ve learned definitively in these 60 years is, there exists within the human DNA helix a malignant strain that recognizes innocence and wants to destroy it…whether physically, emotionally, or sexually. It’s time we drop the denial. How else could the world’s preponderance of human trafficking, child abuse, and rape culture continue to flourish for thousands of years after we graduated to being ‘civilized’?

Mercifully, that strain doesn’t exist, or isn’t activated in every one of us, or we’d all be gone by now. I believe in the saying that God helps those who help themselves. The work I did and all the damage I didn’t inflict on others ultimately brought good people to me: caring people, honorable people, morally and psychologically sound humans who appreciated who I was from the inside out. Some encounters were fleeting, others more lasting.

There was the month I spent in a rehab for food addicts on the west coast (my father was always trying to fix his kids while ignoring his own havoc-wreaking demons). It was run by a corrupt cartel of con artists hiding behind their medical professions who would ultimately be exposed on CBS’s 48 Hours for insurance fraud. The mental patients, as we were called, were more adept than the staff at administering kindness and goodwill. At an aging six-story hospital off a busy Los Angeles freeway, I found myself uplifted by a circle of funny, caring, and wise individuals – all macerated by shrapnel from the American Dream, but not nearly as messed up as the clinicians tried to get us to believe.

The summer spent studying in Italy, I was gifted with a surrogate family of fellow-travelers from New Jersey. The Valentinos took me under their wing as we toured Rome and Tuscany, and I suddenly found myself benefiting from the superpowers of the protective Italian-American mother I never had. Mrs. Valentino materialized like magic, and I never even had to utter a prayer.

A decade later, I spent 11 years at a job where I flourished emotionally from doing work I loved, but suffered from an office environment poisoned by toxic masculinity. I never became fully accustomed to the vile condescension from my so-called superiors, but learned to live with being called into the boss’s office to receive his semi-weekly vitriolic lecture on my shortcomings because he was having a bad day. The patients piously helmed the asylum, oblivious to their demoralizing ways. I seethed daily, contemplated a lawsuit, and decided to make a graceful exit instead.

On my final day, I walked out the door at 5:30 p.m. to be gob smacked by the most gorgeous, insanely magical sunset I’d ever seen. The billowing plumes of emissions from a nearby factory’s smokestack were suddenly a theatrical backdrop to the sun’s ruby-pink swan song. Ordinarily, the smoke looked liked what it was: a toxic nuisance, but in that moment, the factory smoke bloomed into rosy orbs of promise, the likes of which I’d never seen in all my years of exiting that building.

The benevolent sunset came seconds after I literally shut the door on an unhappy situation. How could I not interpret its mystical beauty as a sign my life was destined for an upswing?

In broad terms, the sunset proved itself truthful, even with life’s inescapable challenges. My father’s decline into Alzheimer’s was a long, double-digit meditation in letting go and forgiving, which for me, didn’t happen until his final minutes.

But those years were also marked by freedom, lots of travel, and satisfaction from making a living as a writer on my own terms. The road was still a mix of delicious smoothness and humbling bumps. After lots of false starts in the romance department, I met a man whose presence in my life is manna from heaven, and it’s accurate to say I’m being more than compensated for the lack of care I experienced in my formative years.

I’ve also realized some of my closest relationships need to go – or be seriously amended. These unholy unions were formed when I had no sense of worth and were founded on me being subordinate to a predator mindset. The craving to destroy innocence transcends gender, age, religion, education, and income strata.

And just because a truth is unseemly doesn’t mean it should remain hidden. This one needs to be acknowledged so it can be dealt with, one predator at a time. Maybe the collective will one day reach the tipping point, and the norm will be appreciation of a fellow-human possessing a soft-sided personality and harmless nature.

Perhaps a beginning can be made by pledging to remember our brains’ fully operational frontal lobes which are, for an excellent reason, elevated above those ancient, reptilian stems where our animal urges originate. The result could mean the difference between someone spending the bulk of their lives recovering from human cruelty vs. living a life of full-throttle potential with their innate confidence intact and unshakable, rather than having it frivolously derailed for an indoor sport.

So as my milestone year concludes, there’s no other option than to bestow upon myself an A+ for ascending from the abyss and landing in a pretty good place. I’m not the most shiny-happy person on the planet, but nor am I a repository of mean-spiritedness. That alone is enough of an accomplishment. I hope whatever bad karma that brought on the events of my first 40 years has been officially paid off and righted – even if I was Genghis Khan in a past life.

There are a few things left I’d like to ‘accomplish,’ but at the top of the list is to simply live a peaceful life and revel, yes revel, in my hard-earned self-respect. Anyone taking issue with that can keep on moving.

This is 60.