I kind of feel like I am the most extreme example of whatever it is that is wrong with my family. Somehow, I got the worst, strongest dose of it, and that makes me, in an not very logical way, make me feel like it is my job to figure out what the hell it is.

Well, I could certainly say I have the strongest incentive, I suppose.

Let me explain what I mean. You see, all my siblings and I have problems. We’re in my ways not a healthy bunch. Every single one of us has struggled with depression/anxiety, we all have some fairly dark demons to struggle with, and there is some majorly fucked up shit in all of our childhoods.

I can’t help but feel that this is because we all inherited the same vulnerability. I am not sure exactly what it is, but it definitely has something to do with us all ending up as highly intelligent and intellectual as well. ^[1]

I have spoken before about the significant imbalance that is connected to high IQ. How it seems like in order to be very good at the intellectual, ego-driven side of thing, one must also have a very poor connection to the id side of things.

And as much as the arrogant ego likes to pretend otherwise, the id is vitally important to psychological well being. It is the life source, the engine, the lifeblood of the soul, the source of all being within us. To banish it to a locked cage shoved into the background of the mind to rot and starve just so the ego can play around at being “in control” (whatever that means) is to make yourself defenseless against the beast you refuse to admit exists and risks it damaging you deeply enough so you can no longer function as it tries to get out and be heard.

I think we all inherited that particular flaw. We’re a brainy bunch and brainy people tend to “lead with their heads” like that. We’re all very sharp and clever and can do all kinds of tricks with these good brains of ours. But we’re also kind of fragile.

And me most of all, of course. All of us struggled with mental illness, but I am the only one that got it so bad that he could not function at all. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, in a purely raw IQ sense, I might be the smartest.

Mine, it seems, was the greatest imbalance. And while I do my best to enjoy and acknowledge my mental gifts, I can’t help but wonder what I would have been like if I had been just a little less bright and a little more whole.

Instead, here I am at 43 years of age and only just now trying to drag my way through a Cole’s Notes version of adolescence so that I can try to balance myself out and learnt he lessons of the spirit that I was always too “smart” to learn before.

All those things which seemed so pointless to me, from playing in the sandbox to hanging around outside the liquor store looking for someone to buy for us, had enormous importance and significance that I, in my arrogant ignorance, missed entirely. The people doing those things were far smarter than I because they followed their very wise and purposeful instincts without questioning why, and thus they learned what they needed to learn about themselves and who they really are, as well as exploring their sexuality, learning how to date, mate, and be in a relationship, and even how to work for a living.

Meanwhile, I read book, played video games, watched TV,  and, eventually, hung out online. Learning absolutely nothing about life in the process. My head got stuffed with information but my social education was nonexistent.  All my experiences were virtual and third hand, and often not based on anything real at all, and meanwhile, my soul died a little every day and I was too ignorant to understand what I was losing.

As far as I knew, I wasn’t losing anything. And yet I knew I was deeply, deeply sad. From the point of view of 30 years later, it seems insane that I did not grasp that I was sad because I had a lot of unmet needs,. or that I treated said needs as noise, as optional, and ignored them in favour of my mental merry-go-round.

My other siblings are all more functional than I am. I assume that this is because they were strong enough (and smart enough) to make friends, the friends stimulated their social growth, and they grew up to be far less unbalanced than I.

And after all, they had each other. Not all the time, but certainly at the beginning. I was off in my own little world, with nobody looking out for me.

The rub, though, is that I know I was super bright right from the start. Before any of the bad things happened to me, I was already precocious as hell, to the point of it being kind of eerie, I would imagine.

I mean, if I met a four year old who talked like an adult and could read and write and knew basic math up to long division, I would be kind of freaked out by the kid.

Our sense of age-appropriate behaviour runs very deep and starts the minute we learn to sit up straight as infants.

And those kinds of words and thoughts and such sound weird and wrong coming out of a preschooler. I think I must have come across as pretty weird to a lot of people.

It’s lucky for me that I was also fairly charming… to adults, anyhow.

And you know what? I still am.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, I should warn : I don’t know how much I will blog while Ross is here, so I might not be your daily correspondent for the next ten days or so.

I will do my best, but you know….stuff happens.