I ran out of my Reactine antihistamines on Saturday. Look my last pill on Friday.
Two days later, on Monday, my sleep went all weird and intense and draining. This suggests a direct link between my hay fever and my sleep apnea.
Makes sense. A nose full of snot makes it hard to breathe in your sleep.
Oh fuck. Just found my Reactine. I have a ton of it left. Must remember to tell Joe not to buy me more. I told him I was out. Now I feel totally stupid, because it was right in front of me. And yet, when I went to look for it Saturday, could not find it.
I hate that my life includes so many incidents just like that. Absentminded and clueless to a “what the fuck is wrong with me?” level.
I try so hard to keep it together and yet shit like that just keeps on happening. I am beginning to wonder if I qualify as mentally impaired.
Come to think of it, I was a impaired genius as a kid. Like I have said before, I was quite the conundrum for school system. Showed up already knowing how to read and do math and so on, but my writing was terrible and I was very uncoordinated and clumsy, way more so than other kids my age.
I was pretty hard to teach too. I still feel bad about how I treated that Jamaican lady assigned to get me up to speed in terms of writing and coordination.
Not that I knew what I was doing. I was seven. But looking back, I drove that poor woman to tears because my mind would wander while she was talking to me, I was defiant and difficult because she was making me do things I didn’t want to do and didn’t like doing, and therefore I made little progress and what progress I did make, I would seemingly lose when I didn’t feel like cooperating.
I remember her crying. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s how frustrating I was to that poor woman. I must have been the worst kid she ever had because I couldn’t be bullied or intimidated, I had no inherent respect for adults or authority, and I was far too young to realize this was all for my own good, let alone realize what effect I was having on her.
You don’t think about the effect you have on adults at that age. They seem like gods.
I was just too smart and slippery and willful for my own good. I think that was my problem with all the teachers too. I was pleasant and eager to please, and quite obedient for the most part, And yet, I was always off in my own little world as wrell,. and usually only half paying attention as a result. And they never knew when I would simply choose not to obey.
So I was a very difficult kid to have in your classroom.
Hell, my little “seems like I am not paying attention but I can repeat what you just said verbatim” trick alone was enough to make them hate me.
And yet, at the same time, I was sweet and polite and eager for their approval.
In conclusion, I was one extremely odd and difficult child. I wanted so badly for people to like me and yet, there I was, all weird angles and booby traps.
Not my fault, of course. It’s just how I turned out. And it doesn’t justify all the ways in which I was mistreated.
But it sure explains a lot.
I will be back after the break.
I am finding it hard to process the truth abhout what I was like as a child.
The obvious take would be to add it to the long list of reasons to hate myself. But I a, beyond that shit now.
Yeah, I was one odd little duck. Clearly the system and the adults in it had no idea what to do with me and eventually they gave up on me because it was too draining and confusing to try to deal with me.
I know for a fact that I wear people out sometimes. It can be exhausting being my audience. So even if you like me, I can be a bit much sometimes.
But back to my weird childhood as a weird child. The paradox of being so articulate and bright as a kid is that I gave off all the signals of being someone who was smart and bright beyond my age and certainly smarter than you, whatever adult is trying to deal with me, but I was still just a kid.
Like the 80’s Twilight Zone version of the omnipotent kid who puts people in the cornfield. That one ends with the protagonist, who is a social worker who was sent to that home to see why the kid hasn’t been to school in a long time, managing to tget through to the kid so he will accept her authority and do what she says.
I’ve always been strongly drawn towards any kind of story where someone has far more power than they know how to handle. Like that Star Trek : TOS episode, with the guy who gets some kind of alien zap and ends up super powerful and it more or less drives him insane. Or Secret Wars II, where the Beyonder, who is nigh-omnipotent, tries to learn what it means to be human and mortal and alive.
Wow did I identify with that.
Because that was life for me. I was a kid with enormous intellectual powers who could read people’s emotions and see their deepest secrets like they were written on their forehead and was generally both quantitatively and qualitatively smarter than any adult by a wide margin.
I was a Weird Alien Kid.
And yet I always meant well. All my damage was accidental. And there was nobody in my life who knew what to do with a WAK like me.
There was certainly nobody who could give me the guidance I needed.
And so here I am at 46, still trying to figure out what to do with all this power.
No wonder I tend to just hide from it most of the time.
I think I will go do that now by playing video games.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.