Infuriatingly, feeling like a boy again

If you are anything like me you feel like a kid when you talk to your parents. I know that when I talk to my dad I am never as sure of my strongly held opinions....always fearing he will knock them down. We have not too dissimilar opinions, similar taste in books, a shared love of flying, etc, but I am always aware that he has been passionate about these things a good many years longer than me and whether it is this or simply my psychological make-up that is at play, when I am with him, I feel like a boy again.

But it isn't just my parents who can inspire this deference. I was like this with my motorcycle instructor, my mentor in teacher training, my flying instructor and even the deputy head of my last school. There may be some justification for this: I respect their experience and superior knowledge; I am there to learn from them.

But when it comes to feelings of deference on my visit to the JA last year, I despise myself. I am sure a Freudian could have a field day, but despite years of undoing the programming which made me submit to Elders at Bugbrooke, who I later felt had anything but my best interests at heart, I found myself reverting to a child-like state - after 22 years of normality.

I despise this in myself when I am talking to John Campbell. I talked to him briefly on my visit and found him cold and dismissive. Despite his obvious reluctance to accept my efforts at conciliation, I still found myself reluctant to say anything challenging. I had my moment but funked it. I am not sure how much that is me and how much it is because of what it is to be in a JA controlled environment; probably a mixture of the two.