Here’s a bone I haven’t chewed in a while.

As far as I can tell, I was born with something seriously wrong in my visual processing and its connection to my motor skills.

I have always found it very hard to get my hands to do what I want them to do. And even with glasses, there is something wrong with how I see.

It’s like the edges of things are always slightly out of focus. And they waver, like I am seeing them through air made hazy by the heat. As a result, nothing is ever truly stationary to me and my eyes can never really lock on to things.

In fact, I realized recently that what happens is that instead of looking directly at something to get a good look at it, I look away and back just a teeny tiny bit several times and then sort of take the average of those glimpses.

No wonder I am so devoted to seeing things from multiple perspectives.

My point is that I have some kind of organic malfunction in my head that makes even simple tasks hard because of my flawed visual information. It’s very hard for me to do anything that requires maintaining close focus, and it’s even worse if there is motion involved at the same time.

And it’s been that way my whole life.

But I had no way to explain it to people. I didn’t have the words. Even now I find it very hard to put the problem into words.

And if you can’t put it into words, you can’t ask for help with it.

And you certainly can’t plead for mercy because of it.

So over and over, I got into trouble for something over which I had no control and could not explain. People would get mad at me for not being able to do something or doing it wrong and I couldn’t defend myself even though I was doing the best I could.

In a situation like that (plus a lot of other factors, natch) , it’s no wonder that I concluded that I was fundamentally broken and wrong and bad, and that the world was a cold and hostile place and the best that I could hope for was to hide from it deep inside myself and do my best to only deal with reality in the ways that actually worked for me.

In other words, intellectually.

Now obviously, it is radically unfair that I was made to feel so bad for something I could not control. If people had been willing to spend time with me and get to know me and understand me, they would have been able to see the problem, but of course nobody thought I was worth that kind of time and energy.

Least of all me.

Looking back at my childhood, I realize that my family never really made room for me in the family. Especially not my siblings.

When I came along as an unwanted accident, my three siblings already had a solid dynamic and had all the resources divided between them, and at no point did that change.  I had to survive on whatever scraps fell from their table. They never gave me even half a share.

It was up to me to find some way to get by on what I got. Like a mouse. I squeezed myself into the cracks and did my very best to never remind people I was there and to survive on crumbs and the occasional windfall.

So I grew up feeling unwelcome in my own home. Like I shouldn’t even be there, like I shouldn’t even be alive. Like I should never have been born.

That’s a hell of a trip to lay on a kid.

I mean, to this day I feel guilty just for being around. It’s one of the main reasons I isolate myself so much. When I am alone, I at least know that I am not harming anyone by making them put up with me. And I am not using resources I don’t deserve.

In fact, deep down, I feel like I don’t deserve anything. Ever. Anything that goes to me is a waste because I am not even worthy of being alive and taking up space.

The world would be a cleaner, brighter, happier place without me. Everyone wishes I would just go away and leave them alone. Nobody could ever be happy to see me or be glad that I am around. How could they, when I am such a massive liability?

This is the message writ deep in my soul. Those are the words my depression chants around the clock without stop. That’s the toxin in my bloodstream and that’s the disease I have had so long that I cannot imagine life without it.

And I can tell myself that I did not deserve to be treated like I was. And I didn’t.

And I can tell myself that I deserved so much more than what I got. And I did.

And I can tell myself that I have just as much right to be around as anyone else. And of course, I do.

I can even tell myself that I deserve my fair share of everything. And why not?

But I can’t make myself believe any of it. Logic and sensibility are like pebbles bouncing off a stone wall when it comes to shifting my burden of guilt and shame.

A wound that deep is hard to cleanse. I have felt this way for so long. And so much of my life has confirmed my fundamental worthlessness. Any positives I have must surely be swamped out by my Biblical level of total atrociousness.

I don’t know how to fix this in myself. It’s not the sort of problem at which I excel. I can’t just attack it with my massive intellect and shake it upside down till the answer falls out.

I can only get there by feeling things.

And that scares the hell out of me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.