I’ve been thinking a lot about my upbringing and the trouble I had in school and how I was treated at home because of that trouble. The song above has always spoken volumes to me. It hits home every time I hear it and I’m so grateful now that children are less frequently subjected to abuse for being “stupid” or “stubborn” or whatever those labels used to be. It sucked and was painful and still affects me to this day. Those scars stay with you, no matter how old you get. But now we know more about learning disabilities and hopefully parents are better informed and equipped to handle such things. Lord knows my parents were not.

Anyway, here is what Eddie Vedder said about the song “Daughter”:

” The child in that song obviously has a learning difficulty. And it’s only in the last few years that they’ve actually been able to diagnose these learning disabilities that before were looked at as misbehavior, as just outright rebelliousness. But no one knew what it was. And these kids, because they seemed unable or reluctant to learn, they’d end up getting the shit beaten outta them. The song ends, you know, with this idea of the shades going down—so that the neighbors can’t see what happens next. What hurts about shit like that is that it ends up defining peoples’ lives. They have to live with that abuse for the rest of their lives. Good, creative people are just fucking destroyed.”

Some people just learn differently than others and despite all that happened back then, I consider myself a success. My favorite line of the song is also the title of this post.

I’ll probably talk more about this in future posts as it’s become an important topic to me. Feel free to skip them if you like.

Thanks for reading and I hope you’re having a great week.