Been looking back at my past lately. Starting to remember specific incidents where I was probably way too blunt for my own good.

High verbal skills plus sharp perceptions plus lack of social awareness makes for a person who strikes people with lightning bolts of truth (or at least, truth as I see it) and probably does not even notice it because to him, what he said was both a) no big deal and b) really obvious.

Like, I remember this one time when I was a kid let loose on a grand old tourist trap on Prince Edward Island called Rainbow Valley. It was a typical example of the “storybook gardens” school of theme parks, filled with whimsical little things like a giant chess board and little paths here and there and a little man-made lake where you could rent a rowboat or a paddle boat and splash around.

It even had a snack bar shaped like a UFO! How kitschy is that?

But by far my favorite thing was the barn. In there, they had animals like cows and pigs and sheep and chickens, which was quite a treat for an animal-loving city boy like me. They even had baby animals some of the time! Any time we went there, I made a beeline straight for the barn.

One time, I left the barn and found that someone was selling sno-cones outside. I had absolutely no experience with sno-cones before that so I had no idea what they were. The guy had to explain it to me.

I said something like “So the flavour is not even in the ice? You put it on after?” I knew nothing of sno-cones, but I was quite familiar with Slurpees, and this seemed like a decidedly low-rent ripoff compared to my beloved orange Slurpees.

The man patiently explained that yes, that was how it worked, and asked if I wanted one or not. It sounded pretty dubious to me, but I decided to get one anyway as this was the middle of August and I was quite hot and thirsty by then.

And it was awful. The ice was in big pebbly clumps, not the smooth shaved ice it was supposed to be, and the flavour syrup (orange, natch) tasted all metallic.

So I immediately launched into a highly vocal diatribe against the guy who sold it to me, and sno-cones in general, and at one point I was even telling passersby not to buy sno-cones.

And of course, I demanded my money back. Fifty cents is a fortune to a child in the 70’s!

Now I could have just wrinkled my nose at the flavour and tossed the thing out. No scene, no fuss, no acting like the guy was trying to kill me.

And I am not saying I did the wrong thing, exactly. Someone has to stand up to people who sell nasty crap like that and it might as well be a little kid with a mouth way too big for my age.

But I think it illustrates the problem.

A more recent and on-point example would be when I was in the Core Program at Richmond Hospital. This was sort of an intensive, immersive program for treating depressives like myself. I went every weekday morning and got out at noon. So it was a half-day kind of thing.

Mostly it was group therapy (not the best thing for me, honestly) but every morning we had to do this stretching routine first.

Looking back, it was a pretty mild form of exercise. I feel bad for complaining about it. It was meant to get us physically relaxed for group. It was even done to the strains of my very favorite version of the song I Can See Clearly Now (Sunshiny Day) (the Johnny Nash original) , so it was even good music.

But making fat people exercise makes them grumpy, and I remember one time complaining about being made to do the exercises, and being told they were for my own good.

And then I said something like “Well, I guess people with degrees in Phys Ed need jobs too”, a barb obviously intended for the lady that led the exercises.

Looking back, that seems like a pretty mean thing to say and not remotely justified. She was a sweet and harmless lady in the mid thirties and did not deserve a crack like that.

And I am sure that contributed to my being pretty unloved by the administration at the Richmond Hospital Psychiatric Outpatients ward.

So a careless remark like that not only hurt a perfectly nice person who was just doing her job, but quite possibly hurt me in some way as well.

And that’s the kind of thing that concerns me. I have probably launched dozens of such verbal grenades in my life without having the slightest idea the kind of damage I was doing.

I have acted like I thought I had the right to say whatever pops into my head, and that is not a right I would cede to anyone else.

And I have paid lip service to knowing that my verbal skills were deadly weapons that could really hurt people, but still, I have used them carelessly and with no sense of tact or diplomacy.

Sure, most of the time I have been careful and sensitive, and that’s good, but if I lance people in unguarded moments out of irritation, that still puts me in the negative.

Now that I know this, I can ponder how to change. I hope I have not zapped anyone who reads this blog, but if I have, I am sorry.

Being able to effortlessly put your thoughts into words is mostly a good thing, but sometimes that means that the distance between your thoughts and your words is far too short to allow for censoring.

Maybe that is part of what makes me “genuine”. I don’t know.

But recovery means discovering the role you play in your own problems.

It’s not pleasant, but the rewards come in the form of change.