That’s a damned good question. I’m glad I asked it.

I was pondering why I was such an alien child today when I hit uponj my apparently inherent demand that things make sense and happen for a reason.

I say it’s inherent because even as a preschooler playing with neigbor kids Trish and Janet, I didn’t see the “point” in a lot of our games. And I often played them with an air of resigned indulgence, like okay, if you really want to, I guess we can do this.

Seems quite snotty and arrogant to me now,. but hey, I was three.

And the thing is, it’s not like I never had any fun. I enjoyed a lot of our games. I especially liked a game called King’s Corners, the rules of which I only hazily remember and which are more than I feel like explaining anyhow.

So I enjoyed the games. And yet, there was also this detachment. A holding back. Even before I was raped, I never really fully committed to things.

And I think it’s that odd detachment that was the root of why I was such an odd child. And as far as I can tell, I was born with it.

And that is, to use the scientific term. pretty fucked up.

Is it a product oif my high innate IQ? I don’t think so. I am sure there are lots of people with just as high an innate IQ who were perfectly normal children before they hit school.

And so was I, come to think of it. Well, not perfectly normal. I was riduculously bright and it showed. But I was happy and healthy before the rape.

Perhaps, then, that primary trauma only exaggerated and reinforced something that was already there in my mind : a tendency towards being a thinker and a dreamer. To live inside my head. To always have one foot out the door when it came to reality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about balance lately. There is a reason why one of the ways we say people are crazy is to call them “mentally unbalance”.

I certainly am.

I have this highly developed brain, but it’s come at the cost of a vastly underdeveloped everything else. The image of onje of those sci fi aliens that are huge brains with tiny vestigal bodies comes to mind.

Emotionally I am barely in my teens, socially I am barely out of kindergarten, and spiritually I am some bizarre unquantifiable theoretical construct that can only be defined in terms of other bizarre unquantifiable theoretical constructs.

When you have no religion, it’s kind of hard to measure your progress. I have an inner sense of the ways in which I strive towards spritual perfection in myself (while knowing I can never get there), but I couldn’t possibly describe it.

And to be honest. I wouldn’t even if I could. Some things must remain private and untouched by the brutal hand of the rational mind, even for me.

My point is that I am developmentally delayed (ha) in every area except the intellectual. That makes me feel like I have all my eggs in one (admittedly amazing) basket.

And that would be fine except that all those eggs are completely useless without a sufficiently developed support system to plug my intellect into something useful, or at least something profitable.

The greatest database in the world is useless without a user interface.

And so I am, as I said, unbalanced.  Column A is amazing but columns B C and D are woefully underfunded and can’t do their jobs.

And I find myself asking why I am how I am. Why do I need a reason to do things? Why does everything need to have a point or a purpose or a tangible result?

Why is “because I feel like it” never a good enough reason? Or “because it will make me happy”? What’s wrong with me that makes everything so goddamned complicated?

Why can’t I just live my life and be happy? Why can’t I cut the cord on all these mental convulations of mine and simply give myself permission to live?

Because that would be too radical a change, I guess. My mind rejects this ideas on that basis. And because I lack the kind of emotional and spiritual development to overcome that blockage, I have no source of strength and comfort to draw from.

I don’t even have a happy childhood to fall back on.

So I am stuck having to thuink things through in minute detail and over a very long period of time. I have to write millions of words and go to hundreds of therapy sessions just to make the sort of progress that normal people make without even knowing it.

It just came to them as part of growing up, like getting taller.

I haven’t truly grown up at all yet, except in the physical sense.

And so I starve. The great pain within me is not just unresolves trauma. It is also the pain of the rootbound plant that needs to keep growing but is in too small a pot. And so it grows in on itself until its pot is so full of roots that water can’t get through.

My pot has been far too small for a very long time. And I can’t seem to enlarge it.. Not all by myself, anyhow.

And that’s the problem. I do everything myself. I have absolutely no faith in the ability of others to help me, as irrational as that is. Therapy is about the best I can do. I can’t imagine having an emotional support network. I don’t have anyone I talk to when I am sad or depressed or freaking out.

I can’t even imagine what that would be like. I stopped reaching out to people that way a long, long time ago, and now I would feel terribly guilty about it because who am I to make some other person sad too?

So here I sit, trapped within myself, unable to access what I need to escape.

And even if I did escape, what then?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.