The Soft Spot on the Skull Is the Weakness of All Good Humans

There’s something wrong with the top of my head. I noticed it this morning as I was perched at my laptop writing. I thought my psoriasis was acting up, but once my fingers connected with my scalp, sharp shooting pain tore into my brain.

Wait. That can’t be right.

I think I must have bruised my skull the other day when I nailed the top of my head on our industrial washing machine at work. When loading the washing machine, the thing is so enormous that you must half insert your body into the machine to haul the considerable washing loads out. I had moved to exit my top half from the washer and didn’t calculate my surroundings correctly, resulting in the crown of my head connecting with great impact into the opening lip of the apparatus.

My co-worker Susie saw this happen and said, “Ow! You okay?”

I didn’t want to look like a fool and start crying, so I replied, “Oh yeah. That was dumb of me. Haha.” But my eyes were beginning to water from the blow, so I don’t know how convincing I looked.

Now I’m worried that I’ve reopened my soft spot.

Can a 36-year-old woman reopen her soft spot? I am reminded of having small infants and constantly worrying that I’d inadvertently shove my finger directly into their brain via the soft spot, and it concerns me that, once again, I must fret over such things.

In truth, I worry about accidentally plunging my fist into the soft spot of any baby I hold. To this day, I avoid contact with newborns for this exact reason. I’m clumsy in nature, and it would just be my luck to be lovingly patting an infant’s head and then, without realizing it, allow my overzealous hand to fall into the baby’s skull.

From my limited knowledge of the soft spot, I understand that as the child grows, so does its brain helmet. The cranium is a disconnected thing when a human is born, and as with any newly formed person, their character and little idiosyncrasies, and also the skull stitches up in a sense, eventually forming one single entity.

My teachings, on the soft spot, may admittedly be totally off. I think I read that information in Today’s Parent when preparing to become a mother — or I learned it from Bill Nye. These are the only two sources I can legitimately offer on the subject because I was basically a child myself when I first became pregnant, so if “research” didn’t involve magazines or TV, I wasn’t interested.

Although my physical soft spot may have grown in years ago, I don’t think my mental one has fully connected.

This realization is why I’ve been trying to be nicer to my fellow humans lately. As a general rule, I’m incredibly two-faced. Like the famous Batman supervillain, long ago, I became obsessed with the idea of a dual identity regarding my persona. I am kind and caring when speaking to your face because confrontation is not becoming on me; however, if you did something weird while we visited, I will talk about it endlessly to others.

Yikes. I really am a supervillain.

When I was in grade 6, a girl in our class, I’ll call her Sandra, shit herself on the playground. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a playground but let me tell you, it’s rough out there. Kids are absolute dickholes. The girl hid behind the janitor’s shed at the back of the property, but that didn’t help her cause. She was wearing cream-coloured pants, so there wasn’t much concealing going on — it was as plain as the, well, shit on her ass.

I clearly remember my friends and me snickering from our vantage point on the giant metal beehive in the middle of the playground. There we sat like queen bees on our metal beehive, watching over our lowly middle school kingdom.

I can’t remember who came up with the nickname, but once it floated into the dewy morning air, it belonged to the universe and would forever stick to the butt cheek of poor, poor Sandra.

Shit Stains McGee.

That’s what we called her. That’s what everyone called her forevermore.

I think about that day often now. Not because I regret being such a little asshole when I was 12 but because of the two-facedness of making fun of a girl who shat herself. I was unwilling to admit even to myself the personal hygiene faux pas’ I was committing at that time in my life. Had I shat myself in recent months? Yep, probably; I was constantly shitting myself back then. Had I peed my pants due to a laughing fit that past weekend with my best friends? Yes. Yes, I had.

In a mere two years, I’d have a plastic grocery bag of bloodied undies from period leaks hidden under my bed because I was too ashamed to ask my mom how to scrub them clean. Oh, how those bloodied panties haunted me.

I was just as disgusting as the next adolescent, yet, my unwillingness to acknowledge my shortcomings lifted me up and taught me how pretending to be something else was the only way to survive.

The doctrines we endure during those primal years tend to evolve and stick with us into adulthood. Was it because of my formative years of honing the skill of backstabbery that I became a writer? Did I learn how to politely smile at all the weird and shitty things I endured over a lifetime, knowing deep in my soul that one day I’d dredge up the memories and names and identities of those who wronged me? I’d then flash their wrongdoings all over the internet for tens of people to enjoy in a darkly comedic fashion.

After 7 months of therapy and learning to forgive myself and others for past crimes, I’m beginning to understand the gift of absolution. Holding on to our own and others’ shitty behaviour doesn’t solve anything — it only causes gut rot; the same way magic mushrooms cause gut rot the next day after all the good feelings have flitted away into a space-scape oblivion.

This isn’t to say we should all be dickhole monsters to one another because we will be forgiven for our bad behaviour. What I’m saying is that we all are going to be dickholes at some point or another.

Dickholism, yes, dickholism is inevitable.

Much like the literal and figurative soft spot we all possess at one point in our lives, it takes constant work to fill in the gaps. Sometimes the soft spot reopens, revealing glaring truths and realities that may be difficult to face.

As we grow older and wiser, we begin to understand that humans are not simple in design. The complexity of our actions trickles in from outside sources — lived experiences and fears of an unknown future. These experiences and fears are unique to each individual and we can never truly understand the motives of another.

The best of the bad, those of us who instinctively know we’ve scarred at least a few people’s lives in our lifetime, try in vain to bandage over the soft fleshy opening of our shame. We use bandage after bandage, hoping that the brain-goo stop leaking sideways from our skulls, reminding us of the disgraceful way we portrayed ourselves in the past to fit in.

Eventually, we realize that acceptance and a willingness to do better in the coming days is the only way we can move forward without falling into an everlasting psychosis.

We try to reach out to Shit Stains McGee and others we’ve hurt in the past. We tell ourselves self-preservation is a strong motive for misconduct, and we’ve always been a little too weak-minded. We jokingly say things like, well, at least I’ve never Dahmered anyone because we just watched The Dahmer Story on Netflix and was weirdly captivated and equally horrified by it. We make lists of all the good things we’ve contributed to society and mark them against our damages upon this world.

We search for redemption in the written word.

Again, I move to mindlessly itch the top of my head where I suspect this new soft spot has opened. Again, my brain pulses reminding me that something isn’t quite right up there. I think of the injustices I’ve committed, much harsher than branding a 12-year-old girl Shit Stains McGee. I think of the people who I’ve made laugh and cry and roar in anger.

And I hope that soon this soft spot closes because this much introspection cannot be good for a person.

—

This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

***

From The Good Men Project on Medium

What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean?

My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence

—

Photo credit: iStock.com

The post The Soft Spot on the Skull Is the Weakness of All Good Humans appeared first on The Good Men Project.