Life has, for the most part, been too easy for me.
Even when it was also very hard on me, like when I was getting bullied in elementary school, there was still an element of excess ease because the actual school part was so damned easy for me.
Still is, too. I breezed through Kwantlen (except for that one linguistics course) and then went on to the “intensive” writing program at VFS and never even felt the strain until the last semester and even then it was no big deal.
I can’t help feeling that academic gifts like that should mean something, ya know? Most people can’t do what I do. Surely spectacular gifts like mine are worth something to someone somewhere, wouldn’t you think?
Anyhow, there was nothing in my life to prompt me to learn to strive and struggle and achieve and, most importantly, learn to overcome myself, and in doing so learn the invaluable lesson that what you think are your limitations CAN be exceeded.
I realize now how casually, even flippantly I have accepted my limitations in life. My toxic attitude has always been, “well to hell with the things that I don’t instantly understand because there are so many things that I do“.
The idea of keeping on trying until I get it right would not have occurred to me. I was far too lazy and self-indulgent for that. Trying hard with no guarantee of success is difficult and stressful and absolutely no fun at all, so why bother?
And there was nobody to tell me why. Or maybe there was, and I blithely ignored them in my young genius arrogance.
I was not, I repeat, not easy to reach.
It’s easier to get through to the cops after an earthquake.
In my, let’s say. “defense”, I knew damned well that I was smarter than all the adults who were supposed to be there to guide me.
I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that way at the time – nor would I have wanted to do so because my faith in the adult world was hanging by a thread at the best of times and the truth of how alone I was would have crushed me.
So with great concentration, I managed to stay mostly within the tiny little box allotted to kids my age. It was far too small for a mind like mine, but I managed.
These days, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had gone completely rogue. If I had faced the fact that compared to me, my teachers, my peers, and even my parents were idiots and I had just stopped listening to them and forged my own path instead.
I can’t see that going well. No matter how bright a kid is, society will still expect them to go to school and get an “education” and will punish them harshly if they do not.
But it might have forced the system to deal with me and find some way to challenge me.
Or maybe it would have gotten me run out of town on a rail for being so goddamned smug and obnoxious,
Either way, at least it would have been different.
More after the break.
Earth to Fru
Conversations with me have always been a long distance call.
That’s what happens when you have withdrawn into yourself in order to escape the cruel world as deeply as I have.
Even when it seems like I am here, I’m actually far away. What you are seeing is only a projection of my true self. I front like I am really here, but I am really the little man behind the curtain from the Wizard of Oz.
And I bet there were times when he wished he was really the Wizard, too. Even days where he kind of forgot that he wasn’t.
And in a fix like that, it’s no wonder we are hard to connect with. I spend many years not even knowing there was a “real” me buried deep inside me that has,. in a sense, been running the whole show ever since I was raped at the age of 4.
It’s that scared little animal who has been running and hiding ever since.
Convincing him that it is safe to come out and play and rest and be loved will not be easy. He is terrified of the real world. That’s why he hides so deep, under layer after layer of projections and illusions and reflections and protrusions.
That is at least in part due to the self-reinforcing nature of phobic panic. A phobia makes you feel like every exposure to its trigger will cause something terrible to happen, and it’s right, something terrible DOES happen : the phobic panic itself.
I suppose the existentially gritty response would be to trigger the panic and then ask oneself, over and over, what is REALLY happening.
Like, would this be a terrible experience if I wasn’t panicking?
That might work. The idea is to ground yourself in reality so that you have a base on which to plant your feet and push back against the fear.
So go ahead, freak me out. I won’t care, because you’re not real. You’re just some electrochemical noise that got stuck in my head. Your activation signifies absolutely nothing. You are a broken smoke detector capable of registering nothing but false positives and it’s about time I took the battery out of you so we can all get some god damned sleep for once.
You’re the boy who cried wolf. And if there ever really is a fire, we won’t hear about it from you, because all those false positives have taught us to ignore you when you go off because it’s far, far more likely to be a false alarm than the real thing.
So fuck you and your mindless, pointless, meaningless fear.
I’m eventually going to figure out how to deactivate it completely.
But until then, I will just ignore you.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.