We all have a ‘nemesis’ in our life…. the thoughts of which usually stay with us over the years.

Often this is a school nemesis:

• The popular kids who wouldn’t be our friend….
• The kids that always just beat us at sport / academics / or whos
  painting was always just a little bit better…
• The girl who we never quite got the guts up to ask out – or did and didn’t kiss (and never saw again)…
• The teacher who for no apparent reason appeared to hate us….
• The bully….

This ‘life nemesis’ was often friend and foe, despised and admired, feared and friended all at the same time.  As our nemesis was often from childhood or school days the memories of it are often vivid or somehow real although our memory of specifics may not be so clear – it may also be just one occasion…

I used to train staff and often they would talk to me years later and say the influence I had on their careers.  Often this was as the mentor and guide – but it was also as the nemesis or the person it took them a long time to ‘get over’.

Often, when speaking to them, my wife would ask after a chance meeting ended, who was that, and I would say “I’ve got nothing” – it is the first and last scene from “An Officer and a Gentleman” over and over again – (“Queers and steers and I don’t see no horns….” and all that stuff).

The life of our nemesis is often really only in existence in our head.

It is the so often lamented moment in our past where we think…. “If only I had…”  Well. here is the scoop on this, you / I, didn’t.

The nemesis exists, because we didn’t (or sometimes we did, and are still wishing we didn’t…) and that is the trap – of literally being trapped in the past in your head.

I have a group of mates who are all now, like me, in their 50’s and when I get together with them, it can be for 5 minutes, or 5 hours or 5 days – they will spend the entire time recounting their exploits from 15 – 19 years old – those four years are the discussion.  They recount sexual, physical, sporting and every other types of events that appears to still be happening and everything else in the last 30 plus years never comes close in comparison.

The nemesis is like that.  They were bigger, badder, smarter, better looking than is possible and they stay that way over the years, never to be defeated…..  until you meet them again….?

This happened to me recently.

I met my nemesis after 38 years.

He was smaller, older, sicker and sadder than I could ever have imagined possible.  Of course he didn’t remember me!!!!  I chatted with him, had a beer and then the ultimate, he bummed $20.00 off me.

My nemesis was dead – and sadly more recently, literally dead; dying as I was retiring.

I sort of miss him.

I dont have a reason to remember him badly now.  As a matter of fact I realised that I never really did – it was just kids being kids in the 70’s where my nemesis was created in my head.  I also didn’t get a chance to chat with him about our lives between then and now.  Why school yard battles made him my nemesis and probably helped to get me through the rest of my life to retirement – and why those same battles where he was so often the victor, appeared to have destroyed him and been his only ‘glory days.’

I think my greatest nemesis has always been me.

I have not doubt been and still am the nemesis, focus of hate, reason for failure, of a lot of people.

I’m not dead and it is now, not then.

A few I have met, even the ones I didn’t remember, I have made the platitudes of apology for past wrongs (?), for things I said (?), for the angst I may have caused (?), their lives I destroyed, their self confidence stolen, their marriages broken up, cancer, global warming and the demise of the whale… because that is what they needed to hear from me to defeat their nemesis – or a least blame them – it is the least I can do for a ‘chinese burn’ or a ‘dead leg’ 30 years ago…. plus, in many cases I needed to do this for myself – even if I couldn’t remember the thing they have been thinking about for years.

The other way to defeat your nemesis is to get a mirror and have a look – not a yourself, but to make sure they are not on your back – because if they aren’t (and mostly they aren’t unless it is some sort of spooky horror movie..) then you are actually standing there by yourself.

Some have one nemesis, some have many, some are the nemesis and some are dead.

I think unless it calls for a sword fight, or pistols at 20 paces, the nemesis of youth, perhaps even our recent lives are actually dead at the exact moment we stop thinking about them – or unless of course they are dead – then what is the point of continuing to fight them (bar the occasional self satisfying piss on their grave…).

I think I will one day visit my nemesis’s grave, not to piss on it, but to say thank you and sorry.  Thanks for adding the bit to my life that I only just got to understand – but a lesson worth learning – and sorry that your life didn’t turn out so well…. that sort of makes me sad…

As Friedrich Nietzsche said:

“Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.”