It’s occurred to me lately that I never really had a childhood. Developmentally speaking.
Because you just can’t have a childhood alone. I was so isolated for so much of my biological childhood. And that meant a lot of development just… never happened to me.
No going adventuring with friends. What friends? No learning to make friends, for that matter, a lesson I desperately needed.
People tried. But I didn’t know how to let them in.
No learning to run and jump and skip and play. Hence my abysmal physical coordination. Playing like that is how we learn to move our bodies.
No learning to be sociable. The give and take of getting along with others. I was so stubborn and self-contained.
I guess you have no choice but to be self-contained when you are all alone, with nobody there to define yourself against.
It’s be self-contained or spill out and die, I guess.
And I was such an odd child, too. You all know the story. No imaginary friends. No imaginative play where I used toys to make up stories, Spaceman Spiff style. Always a very serious and well-behaved child. Never built stuff out of Lego or played in the sandbox or got hyper from too much sugar.
School was school and nothing more. I went to class, did the work, got fabulous grades, went home, and then it was books, TV, and video games till I went to bed.
Past grade three, I didn’t even have a bedtime. After all,. for me to have a bedtime, someone had to actually pay attention to whether I was in bed yet or not AND what time it was and then maybe even have to INTERACT with me enough to tell me to go to bed and there was clearly no way that was going to keep happening once they figured out they could get away with just… ya know, not doing that.
Plus all the other developmental milestones I missed. Never dated or learned to drive or fell in love or had any kind of sex except the solo performance kind. Still haven’t had a real adult type full time job. Never traveled solo.
What I want to know is what are the long term effects of lack of childhood development?
You end up very underdeveloped, I guess. That seems to apply to me. I could reasonably be described as the victim of childhood emotional malnourishment.
So I ended up as weak and as timid as I am now.
Mind like a canyon, soul like a thimble.
They say it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. What a cruel fucking joke. Maybe that’s true if your biggest problem is that you never went to Disneyland or get that pony you wanted, but when you missed practically everything… what the hell would that even mean?
Probably helps to be rich, too.
It hurts to think about my cold, dry, dead childhood. I can feel everything that is missing in me because of how things went down. It’s where all that Midnight Tundra came from in the first place.
I can’t see any way out of this shark cage of mine and till I escape it. I am not going to be able to get any of those nutrients I need.
So I guess I’m fucked
And not in the good way. That would probably help a lot. .
More after the break.
A chink in the armor
Don’t worry, I’m not about to make a racist joke.
This prison cell of mine has one heck of a view. I can see a lot from here. And through my obscure magics, I can even make it seem like I am down there with the people. They can see me and hear me. They can even touch me, though they seldom do.
But I am not really there. I am never really there. I am always right here, in this cell, protected and trapped by its walls in equal measure.
I know that the door isn’t even locked. Not really. I could open the door and leave any time that I felt like it, and that the real thing holding me hostage is my inability to feel safe without these thick stone walls around me.
It’s just a lot less work to stay calm if I imagine that door to be impenetrably locked.
It amounts to the same thing anyway. I am trapped in here. And so I languish, for the most part. I wither away.
But occasionally I have the strength and/or impatience to look for a way out. There has to be some weakness in the forces which bind me that I can exploit to escape.
A secret passageway through the sturdy walls of my neurosis.
If only it were that simple. But those walls are made of more than mere stone. What looks like rock is really the dead flesh of a wounded and necrotized mind that centuries of exposure to the interstellar void has rendered harder than weathered granite.
So my escape relies on tunneling through that stuff. And there’s a lot of it. Every day I burn more away, and I can tell by the slow change of temperature that I am getting closer to the surface all the time.
But it’s taking so long. I want to be alive NOW. My blowtorch id runs hot and impatient. It permits itself to be used in the excavation project, but that takes only a fraction of its power, and the rest stalks back and forth like the caged predator it is.
Good thing I am also learning, albeit slowly, to focus more and more of my id’s power into my magic…. my words.
That’s the real escape plan, I suppose. To keep on writing , every word stretching this tiny opening into the world a little bigger, until one day I can wriggle through it and make my escape that way.
It might sound crazy but it’s the best plan I have got.
One of these days I will escape this rotten cell.
Because one of these days I won’t need it any more.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.