At least, not in the Freudian sense.

I have talked about my being oral retentive in this space before. Under Freud, that means that I never completed the transition from the oral phase on an infant (passive. self-oriented, concentrates on pleasures via the mouth like talking and eating) to the anal phase of a toddler being potty trained.

Said little pooper has transitioned from oral passivity to a phase where they must differentiate themselves from others and learn control themselves – to not do what their body is telling them to do – in order to please its newly differentiated caregiver(s).

As an extension of this, the child learns disgust, and the concepts of “mess” and “dirt” and other extensions of the anal phase. It learns to control its environment in order to satisfy these newly awakened and shaped sense of “dirty” and “clean.”

And I…. didn’t quite make it.

That’s very clear to me now. Obviously, I made it enough to know where the poop goes, but I never got the lessons in taking care of yourself and your environment.

This was, I have decided, do to neglect.

Nobody was paying enough attention to me to enforce anything but the most basic hygiene rules on me. Nobody had the slightest intention of investing anything like that amount of time, attention, and energy on an unwanted interloper like me.

It’s a little odd that my babysitter Betty didn’t step in to fill that role. She was a wonderful babysitter and I will go to my grave loving her with all my heart, even though she probably barely remembers me now.

What could be more middle class than hiring a working class person to love your children for you?

Looking back on my early childhood. I think she probably did perform the role if teaching me to be more neat and tidy and to look after myself.

But then I got raped at the age of 4. And that’s a textbook thing that causes children to regress. I regressed back into the passive oral stage, and was still there when school, rejection, bullying, and total social isolation happened.

No wonder I never made it back to the anal stage. I’m lucky I didn’t end up regressing so far that I became a zygote.

As a result of this, I have very little urge towards cleanliness. My room is always a total mess. Showering is something I do purposefully but without any sort of natural urge egging me on. My excessively deep inner focus makes me quite oblivious to the state of my surroundings. Nearly all the extensions of the anal stage urges are weak to the point of barely existing in me.

And I know that’s wrong. I can feel the wrongness of it. I can feel the lack of appropriate emotional reactions to certain inputs. I can feel the hollow space where they should be.

But the worst part is that these stages happen in sequence, so failure to complete one hampers the development of the others down the line.

In my case, it means that not only did I not complete the anal phase of my development, I never ever got within long range sensor range of the final stage, the genital stage.

That’s the one where you learn to get pleasure from interacting with others.^[1] This where all the kindergarten level social programming comes in about sharing, getting along with others. and making friends comes in.

I never went to kindergarten.

And yet I was blessed with this outrageous IQ. So the school part of school was never difficult for me. It was so easy for me that I never even took it seriously.

Kind of wish I had. At least in high school. Scholarships, as it turns out, would have been a very good thing for me.

But nobody asked me to try for them, and I have never been long on initiative.

So here I am with my genius level mind and my infant level social development, trying to make it in a world for which I am not at all ready for even though I am 44. I live in a state of constant maximum retreat from reality. I am always dealing with the absolute minimum amount of reality, and especially sensory input, that I can get away with and my standards for “getting away with” are extremely low.

Childishly low, one might say.

I think this disconnect between my mental development and my psychosocial development explains a feeling I have had for a long time.

Basically,. it’s a feeling like my soul is too small for my brain. I often feel like my magnificent mind is this enormous overpowering entity and I am this tiny figure cowering in its shadow, terrified by its power and force of presence.

On my better days. I at least feel like that tiny figure is in control of the mighty machine it is too weak and scared to deal with.

And I have spent a long time trying to forget that there is a difference between myself and my mighty mind. Pretending it is me and I am it is second nature to me. After all, I tell myself, who am I if not that smart guy? Where would I be if I didn’t at least have brilliance going for me? What else do I have to offer the world but my mind?

But I am not my mind. My genius is not my defining characteristic. I am so much more than a really smart dude.

In a way, I feel like my big brain has been pushing me around for a long long time. Like it’s a pet that has grown into a menace due to neglectful owners.

But I am not my mind. I am me, the person, Michael Bertrand. And if my mental monster of a mind can’t handle that, it can fuck right off.

Because I was here first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.