Ya know, it might not always seem like it, but I live life on Hard Mode.
And not just because of the obvious factors of my mental and physical ailments. Not that those aren’t bad enough.
Being crazy and physically ill at the same time makes both much worse, after all.
But there are a lot of less diagnosable things that make life harder for me than for the other billions of precocious primates in the world. Stuff I almost never talk about.
Like my issues with coordination. I have always been quite clumsy. And not just on a “bad at gym and sports” level.
On a “might actually be a disability” level.
Anything involving fine motor control is likely impossible for me.
I was the kid who spent the entire sewing class trying the thread his needle, after all.
This has always made a lot of everything life extremely difficult for me. Between poor eyesight (even before my surgeries) and poor coordination I have had a lot of trouble doing simple thing like washing dishes or mopping a floor or sweeping.
The only things I can do competently are the things that are automatic, like laundry.
In order to get things like that done, I have to fight a pitched battle against my own distorted senses and scrambled inputs.
I more or less have to make my body to do what I want it to do by sheer force of will. And that is extremely tiring and pretty inaccurate as well.
It’s like crossing the Alps on tippy toes. Sure, it CAN be done, but…
And it’s always been this way for me. Even when I was a preschooler. They even did a fuckton of tests on me when I was in grades 1 and 2 to try to figure me out.
But then they basically gave up on me.
I was too much for them, I guess.
But the problems were never addressed again. After all, I was incredibly gifted in all the academic parts of school and those were what mattered, so who cared if I sucked at gym and couldn’t walk down a corridor without tripping over my own feet?
I’m glad puberty straightened me out to the my current level of incompetence at least.
This handicap of mine has hurt me a lot over the years. Especially because I lacked the capacity to articulate what my problems were so I could not express or explain the reasons why I could not do these simple things.
I suspect there may be an organic component – something a tad off in some key areas of the brain, possibly from childhood head trauma.
But I also think there was nobody to play with me in the right ways to encourage my motor development and coordination when I was a wee thing.
Regardless, this physical incompetence is just one of the many things that makes life difficult for me.
And it’s one of the reasons I stay in my own little world, where I am competent and capable, far more then I should.
The real world is loaded with potential humiliations and alienations that will reveal my obscene lack of physical development to the world.
No wonder I hide away here.
I wonder what good some sort of diagnosis might do me?
More after the break.
A little more aggravation
Now THAT is what I call a remix. It takes what is awesome about the original and boils it down to its kickass essence then amplifies it.
Anyhow, ever since last night’s marathon of morons, I have been pondering aggravation and its role in regulating one’s emotions.
Because here’s the thing : I have to admit that after it was all over, I felt better. Getting that mad and writing out my tale of woe with my signature snark was very cathartic for ,me and my troubles expressing anger, and that has really got me thinking.
Is this what rage junkies like Marc Maron and my later father are addicted to? It has to be, right? On some level, their brains recognize how good it can feel to get super mad and therefore reinforce those neural pathway like they do with all sources of reward.
Before long, that becomes the default way to deal with accumulated stress. Just flush it out in an orgy of rage. And because this functions like an addiction, it hollows out all resistance to getting its fix and small things like the fact that you are ruining every relationship in your life by turning into an evil raging ogre on the regular doesn’t matter because addictions have no concept of the future.
Neither does anxiety, come to think of it. Hmmm.
Adrenaline don’t care.
So I feel like I have sampled a very dangerous drug in the last 24 hours, and learned a pretty valuable lesson about the exact nature of its deadly appeal.
The idea of people deliberately seeking out things to make them angry disgusts me. Presumably, the nature of the game prevents people from doing it consciously.
Because the most important thing for all rage addicts is the feeling of justification. No matter how clearly irrational and unfair the anger is to any outside observer, to the rage-a-holic, it must all be completely justified in their minds for the whole kick to work.
Of course, being addicts, their standards for justification are pretty low because that’s not what it’s about. They are about as fussy about their rage triggers as a junkie is about his smack.
All that matters is the fix, and getting to it as quickly and easily as possible.
So as absurd and pathetic as it is, my father really thought it was the fact that my shoes were slightly in his way when he came down for supper that was the reason he was screaming at us at the top of his lungs and spewing spittle all over the dinner table when I was a kid.
What a sad and humiliating delusion.
You hear that, Larry Donald Bertrand, or at least the version of you that is still taking up space in my head? You were pathetic.
But then again, I told you that when you were alive, didn’t it?
Good on me.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.