To be yourself is all that you can do.

The title today comes from an Audioslave song called Be Yourself that I used on the 2005 Tri-Level Camp CD. I'll say more about the camp CD later, but if you'd like to check out Audioslave's website click on the title.

Last night I regained a memory. We'll not discuss if its past binge drinking or stored intelligence, age, or human nature to lose and regain memories, but last night I regained a memory; probably not one of my best memories either. I am almost 100 percent sure I was dressed up as Santa once and made to act like I was stuck in a chimney because of my girth while my classmates sang a song called "He's Too Fat For The Chimney". I googled this song and found nothing, but I'm sure this actually happened because I remember these words:

There's no room for his tummy, please do something mommy
Without Santa Clause oh how can Christmas begin?

I clearly didn't imagine this song right? Am I losing it or did this actually take place? Was I dressed up in a Santa costume and jammed into a chimney while my peers sang about how fat I was? I think so!!!

I know for certain in fourth grade I was put in a skirt and taught a Greek dance that I performed with five other skirt-wearing boys in front of the whole school! Kostes Zestos was a classmate of mine and actually from Greece, so that made the dance seem somehow cool, but in retrospect, NO, it wasn't.

Sometime in elementary school we did a Care Bears play and we all nancied around as Care Bears. I think I was pretty young when this went on so I get a pass, and fourth grade I suppose I can't be held acoountable for. But this Santa thing was fifth or sixth grade and somebody dropped the ball on this.

You cannot ask, allow, or encourage a pre-teen to accentuate what will clearly be his physical hindrance throughout adolescence and let his peers poke fun at it.

What kind of teachers did I have? Where were my parents? What was I thinkin'?

I'd like to believe that we flush such memories or learn to laugh at them in context. I'm afraid we sew them to our self conciousness. The University of Texas at Austin has a web page devoted to self-esteem and have this to say:

Our past experiences, even the things we don't usually think about, are all alive and active in our daily life in the form of an Inner Voice. Although most people do not "hear" this voice in the same way they would a spoken one, in many ways it acts in a similar way, constantly repeating those original messages to us.

For people with healthy self-esteem the messages of the inner voice are positive and reassuring. For people with low self-esteem, the inner voice becomes a harsh inner critic, constantly criticizing, punishing, and belittling their accomplishments.

I'd like to reassure my parents, any teachers who clearly took turns humiliating me, classmates who sang to me about being fat, and friends who call me 'big guy' and stuff like that that I do not suffer from low self-seteem. Indeed I am an egomaniac!

However I do think we should pay close attention to what we say to one another and especially how the little things we do and say and ask each other to perform reflect our respect for that person's worth. The fact is I am a big guy so the phrase doesn't bother me. When people refer to my bald head I chuckle, because I am in fact bald. But I'm 26 and have spent a great deal of time being encouraged since I was forced to play fat in fifth grade. The truth of that experience is probably that I volunteered for the part, hell I might have campaigned for it. I held the spotlight for the duration of the song regardless of its message and I know I hammed it up because that's what I do when the spotlight's on. It wasn't a repressed memory. It was a misplaced one, because I have had a million other experiences sicne then to affirm who I was and replace that one. The trick, or the danger, is when the kid who doesn't have that kind of perspective, the support around him, or the need to be spotlighted is thrust into that role. Too often kids have very few memories besides the ones when all their friends were laughing at them.

I remember the moment I chose to walk out of the spotlight and into this life. It wasn't because I didn't enjoy perfomring and it isn't becuase I don't still yearn to be sung about and spotlighted-it's because I root for the underdog and if there were ever a better group of underdogs to champion than kids who have been mistreated and don't have healthy self-esteem I've never seen them.

In your life there is someone that has been made fun of, laughed at, made to humiliate himself; many times in bigger more traumatic fashion than my regained memory. This season is as good a time as any to lift them up. Shine a little light on them and let them know how special they are. In the end, the only thing we can be is who we really are, but how we feel about ourselves makes all the difference. The capacity to change that is in our hands. People always remember when a little light was thrown on them.