I was an impossible child
Nobody could reach me

– ABBA, “What’s The Name Of The Game?”

That line really sticks with me, because I really was.

I was an impossible child. Between being incredibly bright and incredibly stubborn, plus having absolutely no inherent respect for authority whatsoever and ergo no fear of adults at all, I was incredibly hard to reach, emotionally and intellectually.

My mind was just too fast and too strong for adults to handle. All the usual ways of getting kids to toe the line just did not work on me. I could not be intimidated, browbeaten, cajoled, jollied, or intellectually overpowered at all.

It was just lucky for everyone involved that I am a basically agreeable and helpful person who only breaks the rules when he has a damned good reason.

Otherwise, I would likely have ended up in jail before I was 20.

And I know I have talked about this before on this blog, but I feel like I have not truly processed this revelation about myself yet.

I was just plain hard to deal with. I totally understand now why a lot of my teachers kept me at arm’s length and always seemed sort of tired and frustrated with me.

I used to be angry at them for that. Couldn’t they see how badly I needed them? They were my only friends in school. I just could not connect with my fellow students. We just lived on different planets. The gap between us was so enormous that there was just no chance of real connection.

And, well, they hated me. I was just a big bag of weird to them. Pretty much everything about me upset them in one way or another. My strangeness, my contempt for our school work (oh, how I wish I had thought to hide that..), the way I clung to the teachers, the bizarre disconnection between my low social status in the schoolyard (none lower!) and the apparent approval of the school system…

I can see now how they got the impression that I thought I was better than them. Sure, I never said I was better than them, nor did I believe that I was. But I acted like I thought I was something special and the normal rules do not apply to me, and actions speak a lot more loudly than words or attitudes ever did.

In fact, to be honest, I guess I did, in fact, think I was better than them and that the usual rules did not apply to me, in a sense. In the back of my mind, I thought anybody could do what I did, defy the teachers and get away with it, argue with them in class, and so on.

I guess I just thought I was especially clever and cool for being able to figure out that I could do it. And in that sense, I was kind of showing off when I did it, even though I would not have thought of it that way at the time.

And this wasn’t a constant thing, I was no Bart Simpson. But it happened often enough to color the opinions of my classmates.

And my teachers, to be honest. I have a smartass streak a mile wide (classic youngest child) and I am sure at least some of the time I seemed quite smug and self-satisfied when in the classroom setting.

It is bad enough to have some way too smart for his own good kid correct you or defy you in class, in front of all the other students.

But it’s even worse if the little shit is laughing at you with his eyes and seems downright amused at the idea that your word means something to him.

Now I say all this not to beat myself down (after all, I was just a kid, doing the best I could) but to flesh out my idea of my past with details that do not fit the victim narrative that I have been carrying around for a long time.

Life is rarely as simple as black and white, and so there is rarely a case where a purely innocent person is victimized by purely malevolent forces.

That is not to say that I think that my bullying was justified. Not at all. It is the sort of thing that should never happen to any child, ever. The system failed me, and in doing so, they became passively complicit in my abuse.

It is, however, still very useful to understand what really went down back then in as great a detail as possible in order to make sense of it all.

I am always seeking a fuller understanding of things. It is, in many ways, my lifelong quest. I have always sought knowledge, but not for it’s own sake. I seek knowledge as the key to understanding.

That said, there is no knowledge that is not power. All knowledge helps one understand the world better, although some more than others, of course.

But us philosophical types tend to view knowledge as input for our contemplations, and that sets us apart from the scholars who collect knowledge for it’s own sake.

So I would like to think that this rehashing of my childhood is more than just wallowing in the past and taking shelter in my own victim narrative.

I think it helps me to better understand myself when I plumb my own past for insight as to just what sort of a person I am, and most importantly, what exactly was I like before I became a depressed adult?

I want to get to know the person that I could have been, and maybe, if I am really lucky, he and I will merge and I will get to be him, or at least, a version of him.

I can never erase the terrible things that have happened to me in the past.

But it may be possible to transcend them.

And I am in dire need of transcendence.