Whoever first said “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood” had no idea what the fuck they were talking about.

I mean, here I am, 44 years old, and only now full coming to grips with the fact that I didn’t just have a lousy childhood, I just plain didn’t have a childhood.

Not in a literal biological sense. obviously. On the physical level I have obviously completed my larval stage.

But psychologically, and especially socially,. I did not have a childhood at all. For most of it I did not have friends. When I had friends, they weren’t good ones.  I passed none of the usual milestones. No first kiss, first date, first sex, driver’s license, or any of the other things that not only mark someone’s development but are part of it, and without these events, the development does not happen.

I went to school,. came home, and became absorbed in my distractions – TV, books, video came – until it was time to go to bed.

Then I woke up the next day and did it all again. Every day. For all the time I was in school. It was all I knew. And it’s still all I know.

Nobody gave a damn about me. Least of all me. Nobody was paying attention. There was nobody to kiss it better if I fell. There was nobody looking after me to make sure I did not get hurt. There was nobody to teach me or guide me in how to live a life.

And the thing is, when there is nobody watching over you to keep you from harm, and you are all too aware of how incomplete your understanding of the world is,. and bad things keep hapopening to you and you don’t know why and nobody seems to be interested in stopping them, all you can do is become extremely averse to risk.

That’s what happenes to any animal that is exposed to random negative stimuli. At first they try to avoid the pain, But there’s no pattern. So they despair.

That’s why I build such thick walls between me and the outside world – unaware that I was also keeping the good stuff from getting in. My life became one based entirely around the consumption of media (and food) – so much the food).

And this was not without its benefits. I learned a lot,. processed a lot, gained an understanding of the world better that most adults had. With all that boredom in school, I have a lot of time to think, and that made me quite thoughtful.

After all, just sitting there thinking about things is an activity that requires no equipment, no external validation, no partner, and can be done at any time and at any place. All it requires is time (and space) to think.

It was the perfect activity for an extremely timid but highly intelligent child.

And the best part is that when you are really deep in thought, the real world fades away and so the fear that cuts you and guts you on a 24/7 basis abtes to the point where you are almost sane for a while.

Same thing with all that media consumption.

But no matter how smart you are or how wise and deep you get, you are still a human being with human needs, and mine were not met or even considered. It’s not just that nobody cared. It’s that nobody paid enough attention to me to even be apathetic.

You have to exist in people’s minds in order for them to not care about you.

I mean, you wouldn’t say that someone is apathetic towards some Tibetan kid in tonsure and saffron climbing a mountain peak and trying to remember all the religious lessons he has learned.

You’d say they didn’t even know he existed. And you’d be right.

And that’s how it was for me as a kid. I was less substantial than the shadow of a ghost. People knew I existed, in the same way they knew about starving kids in Africa, but like with those kids, they preferred not to think about me and I was not about to force them to do so,

I was far too timid for that.

So I disappeared. I became invisible. It was clear that I was not supposed to be here and that the best thing I could do was to exist as little as possible in order to place the least burden on my very reluctant hosts.

And that’s still how I feel today. Despite all evidence, most of the time I feel like I am an inexcusable liability that has no right to even exist and who can expect nothing more in life than to be a highly resented burden on others who only deal with mne at all out of guilt and who really wish I would just go off and die somewhere so they would not be stuck with me any more.

I know that isn’t true. But it’s how I feel anyhow. That’s why I had to create this alternate identtiy for myself online just to be able to feel comfortable amongst others.

Fruvous doesn’t have all my social damage. Through him, I can express everything that my damaged real self cannot. Things like my flamboyance,,my vibrant personality, my sexual self, my charisma, my charm, my wit, and my warmth, without my timid traumatized real self to hold him back.

Like I have said many times before, he is my ideal self. If I could learn to be like him in the real world, I would consider myself to have achieved transcendence.

But the icy cold grip of fear holds me back.

Anddespite what I sometimes find myself thinking,  I can’t just shrug it off with some kind of massive act of will.

That may come some day, but not until I thaw out and revive.

Writing blog posts like this is part of that process.

And I thank you. all my wonderful readers, for making it all possible.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

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