The word mines, that is. Black ink. Texas text.

Today has been a writing day for me. I have 25 pages of movie script due Monday afternoon, and when I got up this morning, I had 8.

But I am proud to say that, due to working literally all afternoon, I am up to 15! W00t w00t me.

Though it says something about screenwriting that it took me five hours to do seven pages. Admittedly, a lot of that time was spent either pondering the next move or chatting with the fuzzies, which is the activity I do to keep myself emotionally balanced when doing heavy stuff like writing.

The idea that I would go faster without it, while partially true, disregards the emotional stability factor. And with a screwloose creative type like me, that’s always a major factor.

I sometimes wonder whether or not I had a choice as to what I became. By that, I mean that I wonder if there was a chance that I would not become the walker between walls who seems to have one more dimension than the rest of humanity and is therefore incomprehensible to it. Was I always going to be a person who searched for the truth regardless of the consequences to himself? Was I born with this need to seek the truth no matter what, or was there something that set me on this path?

In some alternate universe, is there a version of me that grew up normal and happy within the paper-thin walls of social reality?

Maybe. Certainly it seems plausible to me that this bizarre nature of mine is the result of specific hardships in my life. For example, being too smart to be happy at school. I spent most of my educational life incredibly bored. Yet I am not the type to act up because of that. For the most part, I’m quite docile and if not precisely obedient then very agreeable, which amounts to the same thing.

Acting up never made any sense to me. So I didn’t do it. That suggests a serious problem in and of itself, because it show that I was exercising rational restraint at what is arguably too young an age. And the thing about rational restraint is that it kills nearly all the paths by which one might express one’s emotions. Especially the more boisterous and energetic ones.

After all, I was a child, not a Vulcan. And like a Vulcan, I have always taken pride in my restraint. Others might go off half cocked or act on emotion without thought to the consequences, but I, the rational reasonable restraint guy, would never do those sorts of things.

I’m too smart for that!

But the thing is, a child acting up out of boredom didn’t decide to do that. They are acting out of emotion and by doing so, express that emotion. They might get in more trouble and they might never get to pat themselves on the back for how much more in control of themselves they are than other kids, but they also accumulated far fewer suppressed emotions to weight them down too.

And at this point in my life, I’d trade.

I think, at the root of it, the problem began as an unintended consequence of the circumstances of my birth. Because I was the lost child who showed up uninvited, I ended up with the distinct impression that I was not allowed to be a child. I had to grow up fast and learn to behave and always check my behaviour before I committed the unthinkable acts of drawing attention to myself and forcing someone to actually look after me for a few moments.

That would have gotten me in trouble big time.

So I was, more or less, expected to look after myself from a very early age. Especially after I started going to school. That’s when the babysitter disappeared and I was truly on my own. I felt like no matter what happened, nobody cared, and the last thing that was allowed for me was to not be OK, let alone ask someone to MAKE it OK.

That’s where I got the ghost that still haunts me, the feeling that nobody really wants me around and that people would be happier if I had never showed up in the first place and that I was always just barely earning the right to be around people and that meant that if I made myself any more of a burden than the bare minimum, I would be ejected and abandoned.

The fact that I had no people my age around once I went to school was also a factor. All my role models were at least four years older than me. I had nobody to model normal childhood behaviour for me. So I thought I had to stop being a kid and catch up as fast as I could, or be left behind.

Being left behind might be my biggest fear ever.

So in a sense, I was never a kid in the emotional sense. I never tested the limits, never acted up just to see what happens, never learned to ask for things to get my needs met. And, most importantly to the actual point of this blog entry, I spent a lot of time in school bored bonkers.

So I retreated into my mind. In doing so, I became a thinker. A ponderer. A philosopher. I sought the truth of things, which I found via deduction and intuition based on the data I had. Instead of exploring the world I explored the world inside.

In other words, I figured shit out.

And so I always knew more than the other kids too, and I am not just talking about academic subjects. I understood more of the world, partly become of my constant deduction but also because of the sharp, deep input of my empathy. I figured out that people were often insincere and that people lied to protect their emotions at a very young age.

So could I have been a normal kid? Maybe. Maybe if I had lucked into connecting with the right kind of mentor who could put up with my sometimes difficult nature and provide actual guidance to me, I could have stayed more attached to the world instead of being sucked deeper and deeper into the world within, whereupon I learned strange truths and was changed by them.

Or maybe I would have turned out somewhat the same no matter what.

I guess we’ll never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
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