When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
I know at one point I had bright red hair and I had bracelets from my wrist up to my elbow and I was wearing size 50 pants. I wouldn't wear that today, but I'm not embarrassed about wearing it back then any more.
I don't know anyone who was never a geek, really, when they look at their own lives. I think that from the outside looking in, you think that you weren't necessarily a tragic geek, but yes, you did lean in that direction.
You can't go back again, even if you wanted to. But you can own your own life, mistakes and all.
I can look back at things I've done and said and worn and be completely humiliated by them, but I can never say it wasn't me. I feel really honored to say that.
I loved my start. I'm proud of my spots. I don't feel embarrassed by anything that I did... It definitely helped me more than hurt me.
To avoid tripping on the chain of the past, you have to pick it up and wind it about you.
There's a certain grace in accepting what your life is and embracing all the good things that have been - but there's still an expectation of good things to come. Not necessarily what you expected.
When you're young, you're stupid. You do silly things. I did it (the O-Z-Z-Y tattoo across his knuckles) when I was 14. I was in jail for something. I could have had it removed, but why? It's my trademark. People stop me and say, 'Let me have a look at your hand.'
In saying no to progress, it is not the future which they condemn, but themselves. They give themselves a melancholy disease; they inoculate themselves with the past. There is but one way of refusing tomorrow, that is to die.
You are who you are, why should you deny your past?
Not to sound too Dr. Phil all of a sudden, but I think the key to survival is to embrace one's past and to not run away from it. And to come to some sort of relationship with it or understanding of it.
