I have been meditating on what a strange child I was lately.
For one thing, there was the precocious intelligence. I learned to read when I was two years old. I soaked up information like a sponge. I dazzled all adults by being able to talk to them at a surprisingly adult level given I was not even in school yet. I read Shakespeare. (Well, I read the words. I couldn’t follow it because of all the archaic language and so on. But I read it!)
So I had an early experience of people being wowed (and, in retrospect, I think kind of intimidated) by me and all I was doing was things which came naturally and easily to me.
That has to have had an effect on my idea of the world and how it should work.
And I didn’t play with toys. I would get toys as gifts, and play with them for half and hour or so, and then barely even look at them again. I vastly preferred books, books kept me entertained and stimulated for far longer than some toy that just did a few things.
I never did anything like using my toys as little play-actors in imaginative story play. The idea never even occurred to me, to be honest. Despite being a lonely child with nobody to play with, somehow I never developed the desire or ability to make up stories in my head and use my toys to act them out. I just read books and watched television, and later played video games. Those provided a lot of stimulation without me investing a lot of effort.
And it cannot be normal or good to grow up without playmates either. For a brief time, I had friends in my next door neighbour Trish and my across the street neighbour Janet. But they were older than me, and so went to school years before I did, so I didn’t have them long. And my siblings were much older than me, so they were off into the world of school and their own social lives far before me.
So I was raised by a babysitter until school age, then I was pretty much on my own. I never had real friends in school, and when I had friends at all, it was generally a fairly abusive relationship. I didn’t have anything like a close friend until I was in college.
And it’s no wonder. I think I missed the boat on socialization, more or less. I never learned to make friends and get along with people. I was a loner, though not by choice. But by the time I went to school, I had already missed some vital stage where one learns to get along with people one’s one age. The things other kids my age liked to do, I found pointless. I didn’t think like them at all. I was vastly overdeveloped on the cerebral front, but woefully retarded on the social front. And nobody knew or cared.
That was partly my fault, though, because I was not an easy kid to teach or deal with. Granted, I was no little hooligan, running around all crazy and getting hurt and so on. Physically, I was quite well behaved. But I had a big mouth and a combination of high IQ and intense stubbornness and willfulness that made me pretty hard to handle, especially because I was not even slightly intimidated by adults and knew damn well they could not force me to do what I did not want to do.
So once I went to school, there was nobody who could control me. That is probably not good for a kid. Most of the time, I was well behaved. But when it came to things that did not come easily to me, like gym, or arts and crafts, I would simply refuse to do them, and what is more, I would get away with it. After all, I was so good at the rest of school.
Ironically, if I had not been good most of the time, the system likely would have taken more of an interest in me. Instead, I largely faded into the woodwork. Nobody even seemed to really care that I was mistreated by bullies all the time. I suspect they figured I deserved it for being so weird and difficult.
So I was a strange boy who had a very lonely and isolated upbringing. Very little of my childhood was normal. And even as an adult, I am still not very close to people.
Honestly, I don’t know how to be.
