RIP Childhood
A blog post from 2016 about a poem I wrote in 2007 about things that happened in 1989 that still give me big feelings in 2024.
CW: kidnapping, sexual abuse, murder, trauma
I wrote this poem in 2007. I contemplated editing it, specifically the last stanza, but ultimately I left it as is. I searched through all the college writings I still have and had given up hope on finding this. Of course, I only have one copy, and it was the very last page in the stack. You may want to watch this music video for Runaway Train by Soul Asylum and refresh your memory before proceeding.
Remember Jacob Wetterling?
Neurotic because of the band Soul Asylum.
Those bastards had to be so socially aware
And use their fame and status to draw
Attention to kids who run away and those that
Get abducted.
After watching the video for their song,
Runaway Train, I couldn't walk to the
Bus stop by myself without fearing
Some pedophile would drive up
And snatch me.
Anytime a car slowed down
I would speed up. Many days
I came back from the bus stop
Crying.
My mother thought it was
Because the other kids were picking
On me; she had no idea.
That video gave me nightmares
And paranoid tendencies which
Lasted until I was introduced
To drugs.
I will probably post more of my poems. Some of them I really like still while others seem so ridiculous that I'm embarrassed that I wrote them. I pulled this one out because of the news of late about Jacob Wetterling. I was 7 years old when Jacob Wetterling was abducted. He was 11. We were both from Minnesota. The entire thing was so haunting for me as a child that even when I was a young adult in college, I still wrote about him.
I don't think I ever had hope that he was still alive. That his story would be one like I Know My First Name Is Steven. In case you aren't familiar with the show, it is based on true events where a young boy was kidnapped and raised under a different name, enduring sexual abuse for years until he starts to remember his real family. I had a crush on the lead kid as he was played by Luke Edwards. This TV series came out in 1989, just a few months before Jacob Wetterling went missing. I feel like the trauma I experienced as a child from watching this, knowing it was based on real life, and then all the media coverage of Jacob Wetterling so suddenly afterwards really compounded everything for me.
I lived in Rochester, MN at the time and St. Joseph didn't feel that far away. I never went down to the corner store/gas station in Rochester, but when I visited family in Winona, we would walk or bike, just us kids, down to the store, to the park, wherever. I immediately thought that any one of my cousins or brothers could have the same thing happen to them.
You can see that my anxieties started at a young age. Incapable of comprehending how unjust the world was, I just started worrying about the terrible things that could potentially happen. I knew from firsthand experience that you don't have to do something wrong for bad things to happen to you. That's why I feel like some of the childhood trauma I experienced around this time has just reopened hardcore. Especially when I read this in the news: Danny James Heinrich told a Minnesota court on Tuesday that 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling had one question 27 years ago when he was kidnapping him on a rural road: "What did I do wrong?"
I know right now you're probably thinking, "Damn. Not Another Heavy blog post." But they can't all be sunshine, rainbows, and the State Fair. I write about what's on my mind, what's relevant to my life, and what I need to process. In all honesty, I already had a blog typed up for this post today, but I decided to postpone it when my partner offhandedly said something about Jacob Wetterling, not knowing how involved I feel personally in him. I haven't cried yet but I know I will.
Even though as a child I already went down the path of worst case scenario and didn't think he was still alive somewhere, it is still distressing to know that he was killed in 1989. I feel old wounds opening up. I just hope as an adult I'm in a better place to deal with them. I don't know what is worse, having the worst case scenario confirmed or being filled with hope that your son is still alive somewhere and finding out he was probably dead before you even knew he was missing?
The sickest part is that some portion of me wants to know exactly what happened to him between the abduction and his murder. Why? It isn't going to help me. It would just fuel my rage at the injustice of the world. The man who did this won't ever be convicted of Jacob's murder either. I find that to be infuriating. (But I will save my rant about The System for another day.) The only silver lining (if you can call it that) is that Jacob died quickly, and he didn't have to continually endure the terrible things this man did.
All of these events happened around the time I was losing my innocence in the world. They weigh heavy on the childhood recollections that I haven’t repressed. It saddens me that we live in a world where kids can’t really go anywhere unsupervised just in case there are bad people who are just waiting to do terrible things to them. (Sometimes it is the people that are supposed to be trustworthy and ‘supervising’ that do the bad things.) It is one of the largest reasons why I never want to have children. I don’t want to have to worry about where they are, who they’re with, what kind of horrible things could potentially happen to rob them of their childhood their life.
By this point, I’ve cried. I’m mourning Jacob’s life in particular but all the children out there who have had BAD things happen to them, especially [because] they’ve done nothing to deserve it. I want to live in a world where these things are fiction. I don’t want to read real life accounts of these tragedies. I especially don’t want them to happen in my ‘hood. When I do hear about them happening in the world today, I feel helpless and vulnerable, like [I did as] a child.
Originally published on my personal blog on 09/10/2016.
~The Overstimulated
P.S. I still think about Jacob Wetterling and my own childhood trauma every time I hear Runaway Train.