In today’s dire E entry, I am going to be covering some ground I have covered before, but this question I will be exploring has, for some reason, come back to mind lately, and so I feel the need to dig deeper into it and hopefully maybe unearth some useful truths.

Basically, the question I plan on exploring is this one :

Just what the fuck was wrong with me as a kid?

That is pretty much how the question exists within me, word for word, verbatim. And in that form, the question increasingly haunts me and torments me like a ghost.

Put in less emotionally charged terms, it would come out something like this : what, exactly, led to my being so strikingly different from my peers as a child? What was the isolating factor? What force led me to lie so far outside the usual bell curve?

What made me such a weird kid?

I find myself asking myself this a lot lately. I see something in a movie or a television show featuring kids acting like, well, kids, and I wonder why I was never like that. Why I was never like them. Why I was such an oddball seemingly from square 1.

Or maybe not quite square one. I know that during that golden time in my very early childhood, roughly between the ages of two and four, I was not a socially isolated kid. I had friends… the girl next door and the girl across the street. We played in the street. I had my older siblings as well, as a hang of surrogate parents. I was a photogenic kid, with red hair and freckles and a knack for charming adults. I remember being pretty happy overall.

So how did I go from that to the intensely, deeply withdrawn and socially isolated kid I became?

But even back then, I was always a little detached. Even when I was a happy little kid, there was always a part of me that stayed a little apart from others, a little aloof, not quite entirely there. I did what others did, but I did it in my own way, and there was always this space between me and them, like I always had one foot on the door.

And I needed that space. I have an intense need for autonomy, and I think I always have. I need to feel like there is always an escape, that if I don’t like what is going on, I can just leave. My safety lies in my maneuverability and my speed.

And as long as I feel I can leave whenever I want, I can stay and play. I can, in fact, go a long time without revealing my need for an escape route. Because if you have one, there is no need to ever bring it up, right? You just have it there, in your mind, and it helps you stay calm.

Besides, if they don’t know about it, they can’t block it. Right?

So I can see that there was always the potential for isolation, right there in my emotional core.

But lots of people have that need for space between them and others without ending up like me. There has to be more than that in play.

Well, there was my intellect. That was the primary thing I blamed it all on for years, but that seems like a fairly weak factor to me now. Sure, I was ridiculously bright. It might even be said I was way off the bell curve in intelligence, far brighter than even the other bright kids. And that has been known to have a socially isolating effect.

But that does not seem like it to me. Surely mere intellect cannot doom one to social isolation. Surely not all really bright kids end up like me. I refuse to believe that.

That leaves the obvious thing : the sexual abuse I suffered from my father, Larry Donald Bertrand, that fateful day when I was so very young.

Perhaps that was the shattering factor, the thing that caused the fatal transformation from the sort of person who can handle things into the sort of person who responds to pain or challenge by shrinking from it, by giving up, by curling up in a ball and waiting for the pain to go away.

It seems like a plausible enough theory. Sometimes has to account for my extraordinary passivity. I can remember at the time of the abuse making the decision, as so many other victims of sexual abuse have made, that this wasn’t happening, I wasn’t here, I would take my mind far away and make this not be happening to me.

And that ability, to blur out the focus and withdraw into myself, became my primary coping mechanism, and a bad one at that. This was further reinforced by the reality of the classroom for a super bright kid, which was that the work was extremely easy for me, and so I was stuck there most of the time with absolutely nothing to do but daydream.

Add the bullying to the equation, which made me need to hide and be still and try not to be noticed at all just for my own physical safety, and the stage was set, I suppose.

But I can’t help also wondering about that factoid that high intellect couples tend to raise Asperger’s children, and so maybe having such intellectual parents was a factor as well.

And then there’s that whole “not going to kindergarten” thing.

And even with all that, I feel like I am missing something big, something important, some deep factor that would illuminate the entire question and help me understand myself better.

Well, I will bring all this up with my therapist on Tuesday, and perhaps between us, we will be able to wrestle this missing factor out into the open where we can deal with together.

I am sure, at this moment, that this is an important factor for my recovery.

Now to go lie down for some serious introspection.