Scarred for Life
My friend Chrissa and I were having one of our phone marathons recently, and we got to talking about our kindergarten days. (We both attended CSA Makati from kindergarten to high school.) I asked her if she could recall the time we were required to view a morbidly detailed presentation about the life and death of Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino saint. For her it was only a vague memory; I could still remember it like it was yesterday.
It was the anniversary of Lorenzo Ruiz’ canonization, and for some crazy reason the school administration thought it was a good idea to present a diorama depicting the events that made him a martyr to a bunch of impressionable five- and six-year-olds. The guy was tortured for refusing to denounce his faith. His captors hung him upside down with his head buried in muck, drove metal spikes under his fingernails, and jumped on his stomach after forcing him to drink copious amounts of water. Now picture all that in lifelike miniature. I had nightmares after seeing that diorama!
They say early childhood trauma greatly affects how a person turns out later in life. Could that gruesome display be partly to blame for Chrissa’s and my slight strangeness? Could that premature awareness of water torture be the reason that I have to pee every other minute and that Chrissa drinks much less than the recommended eight glasses a day? Could that morbid diorama be why we were the only two people out of a packed movie house who laughed out loud when a guy—strapped to a wheelchair in his underwear and engulfed in flames—rolled down the street in Red Dragon? (We were honestly surprised that nobody else thought that scene was funny.)
Have we been scarred for life? 
Count me in! I just lol’ed at that scene you described though I have not seen that film and have no desire to (the book was so blah to me)… but Hannibal Rising, well, that’s a whole other story… and I’m not going to comment about it here.
I’ve always wondered if some traumatic event turned me into the thing that I am today. But I can’t really recall anything, nor will anyone tell me anything… At least you have a reason and that should be comforting!
But yes, there’s no reason at all for children to be seeing that. I just read a piece on torture today for class and I thought it was a bit too much.
Rafia’s right, at least you have a reason. I think I just popped out weird
I played a lot of, some would say, “cruel” games with kids when I was younger (together with my cousins) involving getting their hopes up and letting them down, or scaring them half to death for the fun of it (yes, we were mean 9 year olds). I wonder if that has had an rippling effects on them since then :-/
You got me thinking… Perhaps it’s unfair for me to blame that diorama for my strangeness. I was already kinda weird way before that. My parents actually thought I was autistic for a while, hehe. Maybe the diorama only reinforced it
Yay for weirdness! Normal is totally overrated.
we all have our share of traumatic experiences (i have to think of mine, though). anyway, that diorama or not, you turned out great.
Aww, Ives! Touched ako *hugs*
Gising ka pa din!
Pareho na tayong insomniac, hehe.
Lorenzo Ruiz is my pre-school/elementary/high school’s patron saint, and imagine us having to watch his life year after year. Although we didn’t watch it when I was in pre-school, we had to go through the details come Grade 2, I think. We had to watch different versions of his life’s movies for the entire ten years I was there. =))
Tina, so you’re even more traumatized than I was!
At least I only had to see it once. Our patron saint’s life was a lot more fun to learn about, because he was a big old sinner before he got converted. His life story was like the ancient version of “sex, drugs and rock & roll” 