[ja]cobdavis

The reason why we never had nice things as a kid wasn’t really about money (all the time) or that it was rare or hard to find. No, we mostly didn’t have nice things because of me. Now, I’m not looking for sympathy or an argument. I will simply offer the facts and you can make the judgement.

I break things.
So I’ve got this knack for destroying anything in arm’s reach. So much so I’ve had friends and their families hide new and expensive toys from me. They would place fun new items high on the shelf, or simply say that it was mostly to ‘look at.’ I knew though, I break things – I can’t help it. Am I accident prone? Maybe. Did I not care about my friend’s toys? No. All of my toys ended up breaking too – which leads me to my next point.

I break my own things. A lot.

Yeah. So no big shocker here, that if my friends hid toys from me. My poor mother felt the need to keep trying to buy me things. I think it got to a point for her though. And you can’t buy one toy for your good kid while leaving your brat of a son who breaks all of his out in the cold. So I wrecked that party pretty early on. But I don’t just break toys. I’ve taken a hammer to a sink for seeming no reason beyond wanting to see what would happen.

I take things apart

My poor mother. I’ve taken radios, controllers, televisions, small furniture – all part setting aside the miniature screws – each with a different color ribbon on the threading. Finding out how the thing worked was always a fantastic feeling, but not being able to put it all back together again was painful (mostly for my angry family). When the front room’s TV remote stopped working because it was still in ten pieces, or when my brother comes back from college to an empty shelf in the garage – yeah. Those were me.

I lost my remorse

Sure, I cared a lot at first. But after years and years of saying sorry – it started to mean less and less to those I was saying it to. That feeling of ‘not enough’ leeched into me and I didn’t know what else to tell them anymore.

I’m why we can’t have nice things.