Not you the reader, of course. Just life in general.
I don’t think I will make it to FRED tonight. I woke up with lungs that feel super heavy and scratchy inside accompanied by a strung-out, drained feeling that makes it super hard to concentrate and slight, faint tingling and heat in patches all over my body.
Sounds pretty bad. So I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Don’t want to end up with pneumonia again. Dunno how I survived it, psychologically speaking, the first time.
By burying myself deep in crossword puzzles and games on my tablet, I guess. Using those “ignore everything in favour of media consumption” skills I have been honing for all these years.
Yay me. See, I know how to cope!
The problem with not going to FRED is that I will still need to do my usual Sunday night shopping for the week, So now I have to ask Joe to come pick me up after FRED and take me to Pricemart or wherever to get my groceries.
And I hate having to pose. But I have little choice.
My word, do I feel like crap. I feel like my dealing with reality right now is like waiting for the merry go round to come around to the brass ring over and over again, only in this case the brass ring is reality and I can only deal with reality when I am in range.
I hope that makes sense. It seems like it does, but I am kind of out of it, so maybe not.
Right now, the inner narrative of my life goes like this :
I was born in 1973. I was a pretty happy kid up to the rape. I was precociously bright, cute, outgoing (but with a touch of shyness), charming as heck, and quite often the center of attention and maybe even a tad spoiled.
Then I got raped by a stranger at the age of four and it crippled me psychologically.
Fast forward to the first day of school. I go alone. School is scary. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do. And I don’t know anyone because I didn’t get to go to kindergarten.
On the other hand, I already knew how to read at a 4th grade level and I knew math up to but not including the times tables for multiplication.
So I had both an advantage and a disadvantage. I was mentally advanced – far, far ahead of my peers – but socially retarded.
Aaaand that was the pattern for the rest of my life, really.
Still, it wasn’t too bad at first. I got along with my fellow students. I was even somewhat popular, probably due to all my goofy charm and natural wit.
But that made me a target for, ironically, another bright freckle faced redheaded kid, and he turned the tables on me and got everyone calling me fat and generally looking down on me, and so down to the bottom I went.
Not having gone to kindergarten, I lacked the social skills to defend myself.
So school sucked. Bullied, outcast, ostracized, and degraded. At the same time, the actual school part of things was insanely easy for me and I was bored most of the time,
I also didn’t have the social skills to think to show some humility. The schoolwork was laughably easy to me and it showed.
During this time, I occasionally had a group of friends but I was always mistreated and bullied by them as well. I was a wimpy whiny kid and not that fun to have around.
Eventually, I graduated with honors from high school. And then, after one last summer goofing off, I went to university.
There I acquired a good group of friends. Nerds like me, with whom I felt comfortable and relaxed and included. We hung out and played cards at The Pit, a cafeteia, and called ourselves the Pit Crew.
Those were the happiest days of my life. My classes were cool, I had a social life, I hung out with my friends a lot, and things were generally groovy.
We all know how that ended. My parents defunded my education, I was forced to move back home to live with them because their severance packages meant that I did not qualify for a student loan because they could afford to continue to pay for my education.
They just chose not to.
And the worst part is that I cheerfully agreed to all of it. It was all done with my permission. All my life, I had been expected to make life as easy for my parents as possible and so I was still the kid who was eager to please and okay with everything and whose motto was “Sure thing, Mom and Dad.”
How clever of them to take advantage of that.
This withdrawal of funding killed me inside. I went downhill fast. Ended up a dehyrdrated, malnourished, paranoid, hyprochorndriac lunatic with vivid hallucinations (mostly tactile and auditory) who spent all day on the couch in front of the TV while life continued as normal around him. My IBS was out of control, I couldn’t keep food in, even drinking water made me feel sick, and I was wracked with pain.
Eventually, I hit my frustration point and started bringing myself out of that terrible state bit by bit, fighting it with a savage determination.
That got me to a stable state, and that is where I have been ever since. For more than 20 years, I have managed to get by via compulsively playing videos and hanging out online all day. I have done it in Portland, Silicon Valley, the GVRD, and of course, back home in Summerside, and to be honest, it’s pretty much the same everywhere.
At times, I have fought back against my mental illness. Other times it was all I could do to survive. The mental health system here has let me down in many ways over the last 20 years and I only started to actually get better when I happened to ask for individual therapy when there happened to be a therapist open to new patients and therefore I got hooked up with Doctor Costin.
It’s been a long road since then. It took me to Kwantlen and then VFS but it could not save me from my own inner demons when they took advantage of me and coninced me to quit a great job and then not get a new one right away.
And then Skyrim came along, and their victory was complete.
And I still have not really recovered from Skyrim. That hole was mighty deep and I am still not as functional as I was when I fell in for over a year.
And that’s where I am right now. Making it through the day the best I can, clinging to this sad little perch of mine, life not going anywhere, just a long painful slide to the grave.
That’s the story so far. Can’t say it is particularly exciting or moving. But it’s life.
I hope it has a happy ending.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.