I mean, sure, physically I was a child once. Can’t deny that.

But I never had a childhood, so how could I have truly been a child?

So many of the things that were supposed to happen in one’s childhood just plain never happened to me. My intensely lonely childhood was so much worse than lonely.

No friends. No peer group. No hanging out together. No social exploration. And when the time came, no sexual exploration either. No learning to get along with others. No learning to resolve disputes. No learning to make and keep friends. No learning to fend for myself. No learning to rely on others, either,

Just this vast aching void where my childhood was supposed to go.

And yet, I was too shy and skittish to let anyone know how sad I was. If an adult had cared enough to ask, I would have brightly told them I was fine.

Not true in the slightest, obviously. But it was what they wanted to hear. And it got me out of the scary situation.

Not that they would have done anything about it if I had told them. People just plain did not want to deal with me. They made that crystal clear.

And yet, they were only responding to the signals I put out. Because like I have discussed previously, I would start out fine but then the urge to flee would set in and I would start putting out “go away” signals while being superficially engaged.

And sure, it’s easy to say someone “should” have helped me anyway. But I was elusive, evasive, super intelligent, very strange, very stubborn, and damned near impossible to reach on my best days.

So realistically speaking, that “someone” would have had to be one amazing person. Almost superhumanly so.

Truth is, they ignored me because I wanted to be ignored. As much as I wanted people to notice me and accept and love me, I also wanted them to leave me the fuck alone.

This is what happens to sad little monkeys like me that ended up raised in isolation. We fear and loathe our fellow monkeys at the same time we desperately want them to accept us and lets us into their tribe.

What can I say, we’re some seriously fucked up monkeys. Now, because of my own fucked up monkey issues, I have to go take a nap.

More after the break.

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Hello monkey wrench

And speaking of monkeys…. got a largish monkey wrench thrown into my life today.

Turns out one of Joe’s tires went flat. A slow leak is suspected. This being Sunday, his Honda dealership is closed, so he can’t get it fixed today, which means the usual Sunday night activities are not gonna happen.

That means no going to the McD’s at Ironwood and hanging with Felicity at an appropriately socially distant….. distance, and that is sad.

But it also means that I don’t get to do my usual Sunday shopping, and that is a huge deal because I am completely out of all of my usual supplies.

So no diet pop, no big things of various kinds of trail mix, no sugar free cookies.

That’s a pretty major disruption in my placid yet vapid little life, and I am not happy about it at all.

But I’m not that upset about it either.

Partly, that’s because I have been dealing with the issue in little bursts, as if I have locked the potential panic away in a closet and every now and then I open the door a crack to let some of the anxiety out then slam the door again.

It also helps, though, that it’s nobody’s fault. Excrement occurs. Sudden flat tires are one of the hazards of modern life and railing at the forces of fate rarely makes things any better anyhow.

I mean, it’s fun sometimes, and quite cathartic if done properly.

But it doesn’t help.

So I am going to do my best to take this in stride. Sure, it sucks, but this too shall pass, and in a way it’s good for me to have something to deal with that shakes things up a little and forced me to actually deal with things instead of sleepwalking through life.

Unsurprisingly, I am feeling shaky and insecure right now. That’s natural for a lover of stability and predictability like me.

I mean, I want novelty and change in my media, not my life.

But that will pass too. No need to make more of these feelings than is warranted. This incident has no broader meaning and there is no lesson to be learned.

Sometimes, the best thing to do with emotions is just sit with them and hold their hands and LISTEN while they express themselves.

We monkeys have a tendency to think the intensity of the emotion always matches the severity of the situation, but that’s not true.

Trust me. I have done a lot of freaking out over things that don’t matter. And worse, I have ignored a lot of things that I should have taken more seriously.

And so it goes.

Now, our emotions can convey a lot of important information, especially about our own mental wellbeing and what we need to do to preserve it.

That’s a lesson I am ever so slowly and gracefully learning every day right now.

But people have a tendency to substitute emotion for reasoning.

And I can see why, Whatever the situation, emotion is always first on the scene. We feel about things way sooner than we can think about them.

And thinking is hard. We don’t want to do it. When the adrenaline hits, the last thing we want to do is slow down to think things through.

And that’s fine.

What isn’t fine is when people apply that to the rest of life. When their world view is based around whatever generates a strong enough emotional response to knock out their reasoning capacities so they can feel certain.

Generally, this revolves around two of our most primal emotions, ones we share with every single form of life on the planet : rage, and fear.

Such a person is soothed by things which make them angry or scared and enraged by things which ask them to think.

And that’s conservatism today in a nutshell, really.

And now you know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.