Today is Saturday, and therefore, quiet.

Saturday is the day when Joe sleeps in late, and then goes to hang out and play board games with his parents, and so often I don’t see him and Julian at all on Saturdays.

So Saturday is an alone day for me, and that’s fine. One day a week to myself, with nobody else in the social section of my mind, is good for me. Lets me relax just a little more than usual.

I am not sure what would happen if I was completely alone without even the faint sounds of the neighbors, though. That might be too alone. I grew up in a house with five other Bertrands, and so I am used to the sounds of others around me all the time.

Total dead silence might be really creepy. Or who knows, might be really soothing.

It could go either way.

Today, my introspective thoughts have been about retraction, and gaps. I think that there was a point of no return, a line I crossed, a distance I created inside myself, that made me as bizarrely and sometimes paradoxically hard to reach and connect with.

It’s like the process is not too bad if you only take it so far, but if you go past the tipping point into interior isolation then it becomes downright cancerous. I look back on my life and think about people who were trying to reach me, even though I didn’t (couldn’t) realize it then, and I wonder what it must have been like trying to connect with a sad little genius like myself.

Not easy, that’s for sure. Combine social awkwardness, startling intelligence, and my crippling shyness, and you get someone who is at best very confusing to deal with (so many mixed signals, so fast!) and at the very worst probably pretty upsetting.

I say this not to self-flagellate with guilt for past sins. I am beyond that now. I was a very damaged little kid and damaged people end up hurting others one way or another.

As always, I just want to understand. I am trying to probe the limits of the damage inside me in order to best find ways to heal it, like a surgeon using X-rays to pinpoint the damage tissue and thus make the surgery as effective as possible while being minimally invasive.

That’s how I feel right now. Like I am gingerly poking at the dead tissue to see where it hurts, which is bad, and where there is no sensation at all, which is worse.

There is a lot of dead tissue inside me. A lot of very old scars which have warped and twisted the development of healthy flesh around it. I feel this coldness inside that frightens me with its interstellar chill.

It is just plain horrifying to realize that some of you is dead, even if it is just in the psychological sense. (Dead, or so deeply anesthetized that it’s the same thing. )

Because I suffered trauma so early in childhood, I worry that my problems are brain deep. Like I have said before, you develop a lot of your brain mass between birth and the age of five, and my sexual abuse at the hands of my father definitely happened before I was five, so it is quite possible that there is something fundamentally wrong with my brain.

It’s not just a software problem. The hardware is broken too.

In a way, though, it really doesn’t matter. I have to deal with it one way or another. If it’s software, I will find some way to debug myself.

And if it’s hardware, brain plasticity insures that damage can almost always be routed around.

And what the hell, the damage might be part of what makes me so damned intelligent and creative. I know that somewhere inside me is a burning ball of pain and fire that powers all this creative mentation of mine.

Fine line between madness and genius, and so on. Or maybe they are the same thing. After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man’s insane.

Maybe being too smart can drive you insane. After all, we are social creatures, and a sufficiently advanced intellect might well render you unable to relate to others, and thus isolate you.

Pretty sure that happened to me, to be honest. I didn’t relate with the other kiddies at all. They were playing with trucks and Barbies and I was reading Shakespeare (admittedly, without understanding it… I understood the words but… ) and watching Newton’s Apple.

Even the other bright kids seem to exist on another planet from me. There was always other kids who got good grades and did well, and looking back, I guess I came closer to relating with them than with others.

But they were all well dressed, well groomed, neat, orderly, and keen. They would sweat bullets over every assignment and through themselves body and soul to get high grades.

I was rumpled, ruffled, sloppy, and completely immune to adult authority. I did my assignments with a contemptuous flare and most of the time seemed like I was on another planet, and yet I got the same marks as them.

So… that was never going to happen. Intelligence aside, we were not in the same universe.

Therefore I was as alone in the classroom as I was on the playground.

I look back on all that isolation and think about the quite established science that shows that social animals raised in isolation become anti-social, even hostile, and tend to view others of their species as threats.

Then I think about my own agoraphobia and social anxiety, and I wonder how one cures such an animal. The science suggests that there is, indeed, a point of no return. A point past which the animal will simply never be healthy and normal again.

But that’s animals. Surely us inteligent, sentient humans with our amazingly plastic minds can do better.

I can learn to connect. I can learn to trust. I can learn to relax.

Or can I?