In today’s dire E entry, I am going to be covering some ground I have covered before, but this question I will be exploring has, for some reason, come back to mind lately, and so I feel the need to dig deeper into it and hopefully maybe unearth some useful truths.

Basically, the question I plan on exploring is this one :

Just what the fuck was wrong with me as a kid?

That is pretty much how the question exists within me, word for word, verbatim. And in that form, the question increasingly haunts me and torments me like a ghost.

Put in less emotionally charged terms, it would come out something like this : what, exactly, led to my being so strikingly different from my peers as a child? What was the isolating factor? What force led me to lie so far outside the usual bell curve?

What made me such a weird kid?

I find myself asking myself this a lot lately. I see something in a movie or a television show featuring kids acting like, well, kids, and I wonder why I was never like that. Why I was never like them. Why I was such an oddball seemingly from square 1.

Or maybe not quite square one. I know that during that golden time in my very early childhood, roughly between the ages of two and four, I was not a socially isolated kid. I had friends… the girl next door and the girl across the street. We played in the street. I had my older siblings as well, as a hang of surrogate parents. I was a photogenic kid, with red hair and freckles and a knack for charming adults. I remember being pretty happy overall.

So how did I go from that to the intensely, deeply withdrawn and socially isolated kid I became?

But even back then, I was always a little detached. Even when I was a happy little kid, there was always a part of me that stayed a little apart from others, a little aloof, not quite entirely there. I did what others did, but I did it in my own way, and there was always this space between me and them, like I always had one foot on the door.

And I needed that space. I have an intense need for autonomy, and I think I always have. I need to feel like there is always an escape, that if I don’t like what is going on, I can just leave. My safety lies in my maneuverability and my speed.

And as long as I feel I can leave whenever I want, I can stay and play. I can, in fact, go a long time without revealing my need for an escape route. Because if you have one, there is no need to ever bring it up, right? You just have it there, in your mind, and it helps you stay calm.

Besides, if they don’t know about it, they can’t block it. Right?

So I can see that there was always the potential for isolation, right there in my emotional core.

But lots of people have that need for space between them and others without ending up like me. There has to be more than that in play.

Well, there was my intellect. That was the primary thing I blamed it all on for years, but that seems like a fairly weak factor to me now. Sure, I was ridiculously bright. It might even be said I was way off the bell curve in intelligence, far brighter than even the other bright kids. And that has been known to have a socially isolating effect.

But that does not seem like it to me. Surely mere intellect cannot doom one to social isolation. Surely not all really bright kids end up like me. I refuse to believe that.

That leaves the obvious thing : the sexual abuse I suffered from my father, Larry Donald Bertrand, that fateful day when I was so very young.

Perhaps that was the shattering factor, the thing that caused the fatal transformation from the sort of person who can handle things into the sort of person who responds to pain or challenge by shrinking from it, by giving up, by curling up in a ball and waiting for the pain to go away.

It seems like a plausible enough theory. Sometimes has to account for my extraordinary passivity. I can remember at the time of the abuse making the decision, as so many other victims of sexual abuse have made, that this wasn’t happening, I wasn’t here, I would take my mind far away and make this not be happening to me.

And that ability, to blur out the focus and withdraw into myself, became my primary coping mechanism, and a bad one at that. This was further reinforced by the reality of the classroom for a super bright kid, which was that the work was extremely easy for me, and so I was stuck there most of the time with absolutely nothing to do but daydream.

Add the bullying to the equation, which made me need to hide and be still and try not to be noticed at all just for my own physical safety, and the stage was set, I suppose.

But I can’t help also wondering about that factoid that high intellect couples tend to raise Asperger’s children, and so maybe having such intellectual parents was a factor as well.

And then there’s that whole “not going to kindergarten” thing.

And even with all that, I feel like I am missing something big, something important, some deep factor that would illuminate the entire question and help me understand myself better.

Well, I will bring all this up with my therapist on Tuesday, and perhaps between us, we will be able to wrestle this missing factor out into the open where we can deal with together.

I am sure, at this moment, that this is an important factor for my recovery.

Now to go lie down for some serious introspection.

No, not this “Under the Sea” :

… no, not that one, but my usual casual keelhauling by the forces of super deep sleep.

Yup, it’s been one of those days. One of those days where I spend more or less the entire day in that special deep dark sleep that leaves me feeling drained and disoriented and dizzy, and yadda yadda yadda.

This is a good sign, that I am at the yadda yadda stage with this phenomenon. Those yaddas mean progress! Specifically, progress toward overcoming my futile resistance to this phenomenon and my worse than pointless panicky angry depressed reaction when it happened. Like each time it happened was a fresh and brutal tragedy, to be mourned anew.

Yeah. Fuck that.

Sure, I could bitch about how I had plans to accomplish useful things today, like writing my LOC for the latest issue of BCSFAzine (which, incidentally, had one of my stories, One Average Meeting In Space, in it), and getting a good start on my project to go through the archives of this site and submit links to the good stuff places and archiving said good stuff to be part of my writer’s portfolio, and catching up on my correspondance, and blah blah blah.

But you know what? They are just plans. They are not the laws of the universe or edicts from God. Plans are great, and I will always be a planner. When you don’t handle the unexpected well, planning is more or less your only option. But they are just plans. If things don’t work out that way, you just make different plans. You cannot truly control the future via planning.

It just gives you a better chance at handling things.

So I will do all those lovely things eventually. Just not yet. Soon. But not yet.

This is a far more useful and mature attitude than previous catastrophic ones. I am glad that I am getting over feeling like each time this happens, it’s horrible.

It’s not horrible. It’s at best just irritating. Sure, maybe I don’t operate like other people when it comes to sleep, but then again, I don’t operate like other people in damn near any way. I am a one off unique creation, denied the comforts of the herd but given my own special brand of magic in return.

It is not necessarily the road anyone would gladly choose, but it has its own strengths.

And I am slowly working my way towards believing that it just might be… enough. Not a lot, in many ways, and a far more eclectic collection of bits and pieces than the standard model of life, but still, when you add it all up, it just might be “enough”. Sufficient.

I might just deserve to live after all. And that is a bold new concept for me. Me, an actual worthwhile human being, not just a worthless useless thing hiding from the world and trying to beg, distract, or charm the world into letting me live just a little bit longer, even though I clearly don’t deserve it.

To be honest, part of me wonders if I can take the pressure.

But then again, I’m gay. I’m different. Just like these :

As for the usual dream harvest from these periods, this one is a little sparse. I only remember one part of one of my dreams, and it’s not particularly dramatic, although it is, of course, quite weird.

I was having one of my dreams where I am wandering around some enormous mall, looking for someplace to eat (I woke up real hungry, too… must have been low blood sugar), when suddenly I stumbled across Bill Cosby sitting at a cheap plywood table, like the type your church community center uses for meetings.

Yes, Billy Cosby. That Bill Cosby. Comedian, 80’s sitcom legend, temporary total embarrassment, and current rather impressive social activist for higher educational standards. That guy.

He was sitting there kind of like this was a book signing, although there was no books around, and there were people sitting at the table with him (the table was perpendicular to me) but I don’t recall any of them. They were just background.

So I end up within a meter of Bill Cosby, comedy legend, and a lot of possibilities flash through my mind (like telling him how much I admire his standup work, or asking for his autograph, or maybe trying to ingratiate myself so he will recommend me to someone, or whatever) but instead, what comes out is me telling Bill Cosby that I feel really terrible and depressed and ill, and I do it in this weird whispery little kid voice.

That is when things get weird.

He immediately gets up and takes out one of those flashlight things that doctors use to check your eyes, and checks my eyes, and mumbles something about my conjunctiva and this being a classic sign of something. He does more medical type testing of me, and the next thing I know, I have been admitted to the hospital and I am in some kind of mental ward.

How did we go from mall to hospital? Dunno. How does Bill Cosby have the power to admit me to a hospital? Dunno. I mean, he is, technically, a doctor, but he’s not a medical doctor. His doctorate is in, of all things, physical education.

Even in my dream, I wondered about that. I remember thinking “Wait a minute, he’s not a REAL doctor!”

I don’t recall much about the mental ward besides wondering what they were going to do to me and some vague impressions of the droolier kind of mental patients. But then somehow, I ended up wandering out of said hospital, and lo and behold, it is a hospital (or at least a psych ward ) located in that very same mall I was in earlier.

And I can’t find my way back to the hospital. So it turns into one of my dreams about trying to get back to where I just was, but now I can’t find it, it’s disappeared.

One last thing : this mall somehow not only had a hospital in it, but it had a store where you can buy equestrian products, including the actual horse, and a place where you could rent a horse and ride it around in an indoor park.

Oh. And it had an airport.

And that’s where the dream ended, me lost, trying to get back to the safety of the mental ward.

Mental wards hold a terrible fascination for me, so I am not surprised to see one in my dreams. Part of me thinks it would be so very nice to be in one, and have that kind of official permission to be withdrawn from the world, taken care of, given care and attention and therapy every day, and never have to worry about coping ever again.

But that, to me, would be a kind of suicide. I want to go in the other direction, towards the world, not away from it. I want to wake up, not sleep deeper.

It’s just that there’s so much to do, and I’m tired of sleeping.