I’ve decided to try to figure out just how much insanity there is in my family.
My guess is the answer is “lots”.
Let’s start at the top. My late father had rage issues out the yingyang. In regular, everyday life, he was short tempered, impatient, and demanding.
But when he sat at the dinner table after a long day of work and a nap when he got home, his blood sugar crashed and he became a ranting, foaming at the mouth rage machine lashing out at either my sister Anne or my brother David and make all our lives miserable with his tyranny.
He was a disturbed, volatile man wound so tight you could use his butthole to crack walnuts and who was such an out of control mad dog that he drove away absolutely everyone in his life – twice – and died utterly alone
And that sure as fuck ain’t sane.
My mother suffered from depression through a large part of my childhood. She denies it,. but I was there. I know what I saw.
I know what I felt.
She learned to cope eventually. I suspect having my three older siblings get old enough not to require so much care had a lot to do with it.
It was too late for me, though. She’d left me behind long before that.
That’s not real sane either.
My sister Anne, the oldest, is pretty functional now. But I know that there were three years where she was unemployed, depressed, and living on welfare. And I know from reading between the lines that she still battles depression every day.
So yeah. She is not entirely well either.
My sister Catherine is ridiculously functional. She is a high level exec at Stats Can and clearly got all the ambition in the family.
The rest of us are varying shades of nerd.
But I know where all that success comes from. All through my childhood, Cath suffered from extreme anxiety fueled by a fear of failure and a related fear of authority and would have these total freakouts when the anxiety got to be way too much for her and she had to go into total panic and cry about she was sure she was going to fail some upcoming test and that meant she was a total failure and so on.
Poor thing. This is why I still worry for her.
Sure, she’s crazy successful but at what a cost.
Ergo, not totally sane either.
My brother Dave and I are a lot alike, but he has always been far far more functional than I. He had friends growing up. He’s way more normal than I will ever be.
But he has fallen into the pit of depression many times. Unlike me, though, he managed to crawl back out again and put some kind of life together.
In many ways, he’s the most functional of us all, overall.
And then there’s lil ol bugshit crazy me. I’m roughly as crazy as the rest of them combined and I am not even remotely functional.
Never have been. Never will be.
And that’s just in my immediate family!
More after the break.
On being inconveniently intelligent
I have a long, long history of being inconveniently intelligent.
From my very first day of school, I was a pain in the ass for my teachers because I was so overwhelmingly bright.
Luckily, my first grade teacher. Mrs. Gallant, was mega awesome and took it in stride. She was exactly the kind of sweet, sunshine-y, benevolent maternal figure I responded well to because she reminded me so much of my mother before she went back to work.
But started with that bitter twisted bitch Mrs. McNally in grade 2, I was a problem for my teachers because I was so far ahead of the other students that there was really no way for them to keep up with me without stopping the whole class to teach me individually.
Or at least devising a whole new lesson plan just for me.
And then there was the undeniable fact that I was smarter than my teachers in an academic sense. I am sure that this often unnerved them.
We are all lucky that I was, for the most part, a placid and eager to please kid and therefore unlikely to directly challenge their authority.
Well, not on purpose, anyhow.
And I now know that I was a very spooky kid. Hearing a seemingly adult voice, with proper diction and grammar and an easily facility with abstractions, coming from a little fat kid must have seemed like some kind of fucked up ventriloquist’s act.
Obviously I wasn’t trying to creep anyone out, though looking back, I mean, what the hell, might have been fun.
Talk like a normal kid one minute, then make my eyes go glassy while I talked like I normally would talk. Freak people out.
Wouldn’t have made me any more popular but I might have been able to get the bullies to leave me alone if they thought I could haunt their dreams or curse their souls.
Probably be more trouble than it was worth but the thought comforts and amuses me.
And I was inconveniently intelligent outside of school as well. I probably kinda spooked my family members as well, though not as much as they were used to me.
They had been there from the beginning, after all.
And all that time, I was simply innocently being my own weird, unique, completely surprising and effortlessly original little self.
It’s not my fault that I got this triple bonus scoop of brainpower. And yet I have suffered and been misunderstood greatly for it.
This is not fair. I did nothing wrong. I did not deserve my cruel and lonely fate.
But I am not that mad at those who had no idea how to handle an inconveniently intelligent child like me.
There were no other kids like me in that school system. I was light years ahead of even the top achievers. Nobody could have trained the teachers to handle a kid like me.
There were no other kids like me…. anywhere, really.
I really was too smart for my own good.
Still am, really.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.