I have no idea how much of my lonely childhood was due to my being ignored and resented and how much was my just being too wrapped up in my own little world of pain to be able to see those who wanted to help me, let alone let them in.
And I suppose I will never know. And honestly, the exact ratio is not really all that important. There is some truth to both sides of the equation.
That will have to do.
Like I have said before, when I look back on my lonely childhood, I get this profound feeling of wrongness. All those days of getting up on my own, getting ready for school on my own, going through my school day all alone (if I was lucky), then coming home all alone and going to my room to be alone with my distractions, only coming downj long enough to eat supper and maybe watch some TV before going to bed.
And yet, people were there. My parents, my siblings. And I had conversations with them. I hung out with my mother while she watched her soaps between 4 pm and 5 pm. I hung out with my Dad to watch the National and the Journal. I hung out with my brother Dave and played video games and board games with him.
So maybe my internal narrative of abject solitude is more of a product of my current state of depression than a true reflection of my personal history.
Maybe it’s all one big oversimplification.
It’s not entirely fictional. My school experience was really that bad. Bullying and loneliness and boredom and fear.
And yet I know I was a very closed off person then as well. And that there were people who did try to befriend me but my walls were too high and too thick and I was far too good at being evasive for them to stand a chance of reaching me.
And there’s the fact that I was a very weird and extraordinarily bright child. So I just wasn’t compatible with other kids. I wasn’t like them at all. I wasn’t interested in the same things and I didn’t see the world they did
In theory, I might have become friends with another weird nerdy kid, if I had met one. Someone as bright and as unusual as I was when I was a kid.
I didn’t find that until I went to college.
So it’s clear that my internal narrative needs to be updated to allow for more nuance. Yes, I had a lonely childhood, but it wasn’t all loneliness. Yes, I had a sad childhood, but it wasn’t all sadness.
There were good parts too, Times when I was happy. Times when I was not, in fact, totally alone. Times when life was pretty darned good.
That doesn’t mean my bad childhood is somehow instantly good. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have genuine grievances about how I was treated as a child. It doesn’t mean that it was no big deal that I had no friends and no peer group in my formative years.
It just means that I have grown enough to see the real picture and not just some simplified black and white version of it.
I guess I can handle that.
More after the break.
What really happened?
Yup, still digging into the substrates of my subconscious looking for the truth.
So what really happened in my lonesome childhood? It’s not as bad a question as it sounds because I have no reason to doubt the reality of my memories.
It’s not ;like I am only now coming to realize that I might not have been abducted by aliens and made their king when I was five.
No, as is always the case with neurosis and depression, the real issue is not reality but the interpretation thereof.
I recall a time when I was in college and a group sitting at a table broke into joyous laughter as I walked by, and in my mind and in my heart I knew they were laughing at my pathetic self.
This was lunacy, of course. It’s way more likely that their laughter was because of something one of them had said that had nothing to do with me. It was far, far more likely that they had absolutely no idea I ever existed.
Like a wise person (me, but lots of other people too) once said, you would worry a lot less about what people think of you if you knew how seldom they did.
But that’s the egotism of neurosis. Everything is still about you, even if you are interpreting everything negatively.
Whether you’re King of the World or King Shit, you’re still king.
Anyhow, what I want to do now is dig up some of the most traumatic moments of my life and see if there is another, more reasonable and balanced way of interpreting them that is not so cartoonishly oversimplified as my usual internal narrative would suggest.
I have to admit, I am a tiny bit embarrassed by the realization that so much of what I think and feel about my life is tinged with bullshit.
My self-image as a ruggedly realistic pragmatist type has taken a ding.
But then again, I am too realistic and pragmatic to think I am perfectly anything, no matter how ego-gratifying it might be.
So on the whole, no, I am not surprised to find that I still have a lot of illusions to dismiss before I can be free.
Chagrined, perhaps, but not surprised.
So I know where my journey takes me next, though I don’t feel quite ready to start down that path just yet.
I need to do some serious psychological surgery, and that’s never easy, I will be drilling deep into my trauma and hauling my demons out into the light so I can examine them and learn their true nature.
Probably be kinda gross.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,