(EDITOR’s NOTE : No video in this entry because I haven’t made one yet. What can I say, it’s been a weird day. )

Tonight, I am going to talk about what it’s like to be the youngest of four.

All my life, I have had a feeling of being fucked over by fate. There I was with three siblings who had come before me in a tight cluster, relationships already well formed, and then there was me, the straggler, who had nobody even close to his age to relate to and who had to compete with three older, smarter, and in their intellectual own way more aggressive siblings.

I never stood a chance.

They got new things. I got hand-me-downs. They got our parents’ attention (both positive and negative) and I got ignored. They got tons of pictures taken of them at all ages, and I barely existed in the family picture album.

In fact, if it wasn’t for school pictures and occasionally ending up in the local paper, there would be almost no record of my existence at all.

This lead to a lifelong pattern of feeling like I am just barely tolerated. Like I am not inherently acceptable or even permitted to exist. I was not even invited into this world.

I was unplanned. An accident.

So I have lived life feeling like I have to apologize for being alive. An unwelcome guest, an unloved pet one regrets acquiring, an unwanted competitor for parents attention to be squashed and held firmly down.

And then I had to go and turn out to be a little genius, and suddenly, innocently, I became a potential target for jealousy as well.

And so, in a million little ways, a dozen times a day, I was given the message that I did not count. My best course of action was to blend in with the wallpaper so that everybody could forget I exist. And be grateful for whatever I got, because I was lucky to get anything.

In a sense, I was the Ringo of the family. I was just happy to be there.

So I grew up pathetically eager to please. I developed a skill set entirely designed to extend those moments when someone was paying attention to me. Picture a neglected dog who wags like crazy any time someone comes near. I was desperate for some kind of validation.

I still am.

None of this was done with malice aforethought. Nobody planned it. My family never got together and decided to neglect me. Most of what they did was completely subconscious, at least to them.

But my siblings took their cues from my parents, and my parents treated me like they were embarrassed that I had even been born and that on the whole, they preferred to just forget I was around and not have to think about me, justifying this in their minds as teaching me self-reliance.

It did not work.

I mean, they made me do my own clothes shopping when I was still in elementary school. My own laundry too. I was more or less left to raise myself.

And children are simply not qualified to do that, especially us youngest types. We are never given responsibility so we never learn responsibility. People would rather just do it themselves every single time than take the time to teach me to do it. They would rather give me no responsibilities than let me make my own mistakes and learn from them, just like they had done when they were that age.

And then they wonder why I grew up irresponsible and incompetent. I don’t volunteer to do work and/or take on various chores because I honestly believe myself to be incapable of doing them, ergo volunteering can only lead to disaster.

And the thing is, science backs me up on this. There is now hard scientific data establishing that the further down you are in the birth order of your family, the less parental investment you get, both in terms of positive attention and actual financial investment in your care.

Example : our family dentist told my parents straight out, in my presence, that I needed braces. They said “Oh, we can’t afford that!”

So I just… never got them.

When my sisters needed braces, they got them. But not me. Because I came last, I was lowest priority, and therefore my needs came last. There was never any question in my parents’ minds about whether they were willing to take money out of something else in order to pay for my medically necessary braces.

That would suggest I actually had a non-zero priority. That there was something in this universe that I am more important than. That I was somehow valuable enough to spend actual family money on.

That was clearly unthinkable.

So I grew up with low self-esteem. Both my school life and my home life told me what an embarrassing burden I was. My teachers never really liked me but that didn’t stop me from being desperately dependent on their approval. My fellow students put me at the bottom of the totem pole and then stomped on my to make sure I stayed there, or just for fun.

Even at school, as bright as I was, I was a zero priority person. Nobody knew what to do with a bag of awkwardness and ability like me, so they didn’t do much. I got tested up the ying-yang (not literally) when I was in grade 1, but they must not have known what to do with my results because nothing ever came of it.

So they gave up on me, just like everyone else.

So that is what it is like to be last in line. Older siblings always think the youngest has it easy, but I would trade the childhood I had for one where I had responsibility and parental attention any day.

And if any of my siblings read this, please know that I do not intend this as an attack on anybody. I am just getting all this negative stuff out of my system.

That’s all for tonight, folks. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.