Time to talk about what a strange kid I was again.

First, let’s go over the list of oddities :

1. I never play-acted scenarios with my toys.  I have seen plenty of depictions of how normal children play in the media. They use their toys as props and characters for improvised storytelling in order to entertain themselves. Presumably, this is the result of a healthy instinct to explore social space in a safe environment. I never did this. I would not have seen the point. To me, toys were just physical objects that provided very little entertainment. The idea that I was supposed to add the entertainment myself would not have occurred to me.
2. I never had an imaginary friend.  I was far too literal-minded for that, Too logical. It’s like I never had a “magical” phase where reality was only limited by my imagination and where I could believe in things like imaginary friends. And yet I know having an imaginary friend is considered quite normal and healthy for kids in a certain age range. They must also come from some instinct to explore social space and develop the self via mirroring it in the imaginary friend. But I never did that. It was a total non-starter, because even as a preschooler I knew that said friend was not there. 
3. I never physically explored my environment in a hands-on way.  By that, I mean I never played in the sandbox, got into my father’s toolbox, played anything more active than Scrabble, or did anything else that would have stimulated me to develop a better relationship between my mind, my body, and my environment. Even before I became agoraphobic, when I would wander the neighborhood out of boredom, I was just a spectator. I looked at things. I eavesdropped on adult conversations. I’d find spots where the sun felt really nice. But I never played around with random physical objects or built things or anything else like that. That was yet another instinct that never kicked in or that I ignored.
4. I never feared nor respected the authority of adults.  I assumed myself to be their equals on a fundamental level. In that sense I have never experienced authority as I have seen it in others. I have never felt like there were people above me who know better than I do and who have my best interests at heart and therefore I should do what they say. Part of that must be a result of my being so bright – that gave me an enormous amount of intellectual self-confidence. But on another level, it’s yet another example of how social instincts (these ones hierarchical) never kicked in for me. And finally, the big one :
5. I never played with other kids.  As patient readers know, I was a very lonely child who had no friends. I didn’t know how to make friends and I didn’t have any of the usual activity-based opportunities because the other kids wanted to do things I did not enjoy – namely playing like a normal kid. As a result, my social isolation was nearly complete. I went to school and got great grades and came home and went to my room without interacting with anybody on any meaningful level. And this continued day after day of just trudging through life.

I’m sure there’s more but that will do for now.

One pattern is clear : I didn’t listen to my instincts. It’s tempting to say they weren’t there or never kicked in, but that’s not true. I think they were there but my too-logical mind filtered them out as noise.

Because they didn’t “make sense”. Why would I suddenly feel like doing something I had never done before and that involved a lot of risk? What an irrational thought. Better to just stay in my rigid mould and wait for this strange urge to pass.

Once again, I find myself saying : the idea of doing something just because I felt like it would not have occurred to me. That wouldn’t have “made sense”. These feelings frightened me for that very reason. They made me feel like I was going crazy, and by a far too strict definition, I was, because I had these urges to do things that did not make sense or seem logical.

To my nascent mind, following the instinct and seeing what happened would have seemed far too risky, though I doubt I would have been able to tell you what, exactly, I would have been risking.

Chaos, I suppose. Going from a known state to an unknown one. Walking a road without knowing where it goes.

Whbich brings me to the other pattern : exploration. Like I have discussed here before, I did very little exploring as a kid. I was too scared of everything.

This was not absolute, of course. I did explore a bit in certain situations. But for the most part, I went where I was told and stayed where I was put.

The trauma of being raped at the tender age of four left me, I think, with a completely shattered sense of safety and a very high background anxiety level. Between  this fear and my too-logical mindset, exploratory urges never stood a chance.

And that’s bad.  We have all these instincts for very good reasons and following them is vitally necessary for our psychosocial development. By reatreating into my mind and becoming such a timid and fearful kid who did not trust anything he could not predict and control, I was cut off from most of what would be considered a normal childhood.

And the worst part is that because I was so bright and well-spoken and intellectually self-confident, I didn’t come across as having any problems at all.

I was so desperate for any kind of validation that I presented only a bright, happy, appealing face to the world of adults.

Add in the fact that I was both timid and somewhat hard to deal with at times, and it’s no wonder that most adults chose to ignore me.

I couldn’t write a better formula for self-destruction.

But hey…. I was only a kid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

First, let’s get this out of the way. This is where the title of today’s blog entry came from :

Ah, good ol’ Kraft Dinner Lang. I used to dislike her intensely, but that was back when she was a shrill man-hating dyke who seemed to live to piss people off, and normally I am all for that if it;s properly focused, but hers was not.

But luckily, she evolved like a Pokemon into a modern mature and balanced lady and returned to her roots as a good ol’ Alberta gal who never stopped being super liberal (score!) but learned how to express it in a less grating way.

Anyhow. Where was I. Oh yeah, craving.

I’ve been having attacks of extreme hunger lately and as we know, that is a bad thing. It means that my insulin response is so lousy that the blood sugars are staying in my blood instead of ending up, via insulin, in my individual cells as fuel.

Glucose is nature’s fuel. Every living thing runs on it. It’s what powers our mighty mitochondria. But I have wandered off again.

The starving cells pump FEED ME messages into my bloodstream, and thus I get super frigging hungry, to the point where it feels like insanity.

Technically, an injection of insulin could help. After all, if the problem is lack of insulin response, the obvious solution would be to increase the insulin supply and hope that produces sufficient response.

But that sensible solution seems like insanity to me. I associate extreme hunger with dangerously low blood sugar and insulin reduces blood sugar (by letting it into your cells) and so an insulin shot seems like suicide to me.

So that’s not gonna happen. Cross that off the list.

Especially when it’s a problem I can solve by eating.  Eaiting is one of my favorite things! Why wouldn’t I just eat?

Because, of course, it’s not that fucking simple.

See, over years of grinding poverty, I became a person who simply did not eat between meals, ever, period.

It was the only way for me to be able to insure that I always had enough food. I had three meals a day. Three nice, predictable meals. And from that I could figure out what supplies I needed in order to keep myself from starving.

This is the kind of thinking I needed to employ if I was to survive on a welfare check. I had to look at any potential grocery purchase and figure out how many meals it would cover and from that how much it cost per meal.

It’s a rough way to live. I happened to have the math and resource management skills to do it in a semi-scientific fashion. But that didn’t make it any more fun.

The problem is that I am so constituted that any discipline I practice for a long time becomes a compulsion. One with a lot of force behind it. And once this prohibition on snacking became that deeply entrenched, reason has little chance of convincing me that it is okay to do it even if I totally could.

So no matter how hungry I get, unless I convince myself that I am in legitimate medical danger, getting myself to snack is extremely difficult. When I contemplate doing so, I feel like my whole world has been destabilized. That would throw an entirely new and unpredictable variable into all my equations and that scares me.

And I would feel guilty about it, too. Like I had done something irreponsible, short-sighted, and stupid. I would imagine how stupid I would feel in the future when I go to make one of my established meals and whatever snacked on wasn’t there.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But it is completely insane.

Because it pays no attention to the actual facts. It is stuck in a self-destructive zero sum feedback loop where more now always means less later and less later is always the epitome of blind and mindless stupidity and therefore is BAD  and I would be a BAD PERSON if I did it.

Luckily, I have been pondering the limits of the fear of feeling stupid in the future lately. Sure, it’s bad to realize you have done stupid shit that harms your long term self interest. But it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s not death.

And it certainly isn’t “smart” to make myself suffer in the name of some abstract notion of self-discipline when it is (big breath) completely possible that snacking might actually be the most rational, sensible, “smart” choice.

It’s sad how radical a notion that is to parts of me.

Blanket, “zero tolerance” prohibitions are almost always a bad idea because they make no allowances for changes of circumstances or advancement of thought. They are simplistic answers to complex questions and as such are dangerous as hell because they encourage following the rule while forgetting its purpose.

We have plenty of food here. I could go get myself a snack while I am waiting for my food to arrive.

Tonight’s special : sushi!

But very loud voices in my head shout crazy things like I will some how get “in trouble” with Joe if I eat anything beyond my assigned limited and that if I eat now I will spoil my appetite for the food that is coming.

Listen, Joe will never know that maybe we need to buy more apples like a third of a day earlier than usual and as for appetite, I am pretty sure I have a lot of it to spare now and therefore no need to worry about spoiling it.

That makes a lot of sense.

But does no go.

In fact, I worry about whether my compulsions will ever think I have “enough” of everything. I fear that I could have an entire Costco’s worth of food at my disposal and I would still feel compelled to try to make it last as long as possible by only ever eating the appropriate amounts at the appropriate times.

The only thing worse than being crazy is knowing you are crazy.

And the only thing worse than knowing you are crazy is feeling like you are crazy.

And the only thing worse than feeling like you are crazy is knowing you can’t do a goddamned thing about it.

And that’s the kind of thing that could drive a person insane.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.