Time to kiss another demon goodbye.

I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid. And I was a kid in the Eighties (mostly), and so nearly every one of them was a product of the pro-social movement that was the Eighties response to the criticisms of the Seventies. Social conservatives on both the left and the right attacked cartoons for promoting what seemed to be anti-social, even anarchic attitudes, and that was an easy sell to the harried parents of the Seventies dealing with their young rambunctious kids.

Remember, just like effortless weight loss and less taxes, more services, you can always sell people on the idea that their kids’ rotten behaviour is NOT THEIR FAULT.

So all the Eighties cartoons I watched went out of their way to promote pro-social values. Primary among these values (as they were mostly defined by liberals) were cooperation, tolerance… and friendship.

Ah, friendship. You can’t go wrong talking about how awesome it is to have friends. Friendship isn’t even a virtue, exactly. It’s something that just happens naturally to most people. You can teach people to be better friends by being more considerate and less selfish, but for the most part, friendship just happens.

Except, of course, if you’re a very lonely little boy like I was. Then all this talk about how awesome friendship is just makes you feel worse about being alone. For all of my childhood, I got the message beaten into me via repetition that friendship was this wonderful, magical thing that made everything better. Friends helped each other out. Friends cared about each other. Friends protected each other.

Friends were everything I didn’t have in my life and didn’t think I would ever get. So what was life-affirming and pro-social for other kids was very depressing for sad little me, and I was too young to be able to articulate it but I am pretty sure it made me a sadder little boy.

When I look back at my childhood, the oddest thing to me is how I just absorbed whatever happened to me. I didn’t really react to it, or form an opinion on it. I didn’t even get mad at most of them. When you are a kid, you don’t really have a sense of what is normal and acceptable, and what is not. That is especially true if you are am isolated and therefore under-socialized kid like I was. I didn’t have my friends’ households to compare mine to. I just had my own sad little world of books and television and video games, and it never occurred to me that there was something wrong with that.

We are born adaptable and are able to become whatever sort of person our society and our circumstances dictate. Therefore, no matter what kind of household you grow up in, it’s normal, at least until you enter the wider world of school.

And by then, most of the really important variables have become constants in your mind.

And things grow strange in the dark. Starting with having a family that never really had time for me with siblings who were too much older than me for me to relate to them or feel like part of their group, then adding the tragedy of my missing out on kindergarten because I was too bright for it (first time my intelligence fucked me over, yay), then falling to the the bottom of the pecking order in elementary school, there is only one word to describe what I became : socially retarded.

And there were all those cartoons pushing friendship. As if kids wouldn’t make friends unless you told them to do it. Praising friendship is like praising family. It’s (almost) always an easy sell because you are just telling people how awesome it is to do what their instincts tell them to do anyhow.

And yeah, I’m bitter. It’s hard not to be. I really got screwed in life in so many ways. I was just an innocent kid and did not deserve all the crap life put me through. And I was too passive and timid to fight it.

I was a delicate little flower, and I was treated like crabgrass.

All my guardian angels were asleep on the watch. All the adults who were supposed to look out for me failed to do so. I know I was not the easiest kid to handle, but there should have been someone in my life who could do it. Someone who stood up to the plate and took on the job, instead of just relying on how easy it was to ignore me to help pretend I wasn’t around.

I wasn’t the easiest kid to handle. But I was still a kid. Someone should have been there for me.

Obviously, it is watching My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic that has brought all this stuff up for me. Part of me wishes I could go to the happy accepted innocent fun world where all this stuff makes sense. Even when I was little, I would look into the windows of seemingly happy homes and wish they would let me into their warm and accepting world. But I never truly believed it could happen because I knew, deep down, that I didn’t belong in that world, and that I would spoil it far before it could ever fix me.

I guess that is what happens when you are sexually abused as a child. Your innocence is forever lost, and you feel broken and dirty and poisonous for the rest of your life. And the feeling is not entirely unjustified, at least if you are as sensitive a soul as I am. I can feel when my strangeness is hurting people. I can tell when contact with the negatives of my nature is draining the happiness and life force out of others.

And I am too kind a soul not to care about it.

Where is the love for the gentle men of the world?

Talk to you tomorrow, folks.