Long time no see.
Dec. 31st, 2022 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainiesIt has been a very difficult few months in terms of introspection and inner dialogue. However, taking up (however briefly it has been since we started two days ago, this one making the third) the habit of taking an hour's walk each day has greatly boosted our ability to think clearly, and as that is, I'm not surprised to find myself here.
I'll spare you the recap. It's pointless. Too much has happened, in terms of our inner workings, and this is not our mental health blog to begin with - that thing is elsewhere, similarly ignored and abandoned in terms of any meaningful content (though we do like looking at pretty pictures, and at this point, it'll probably come as a surprise to our followers that we post about mental health to begin with when we start again.)
What I'm here for is... memories. I haven't really practiced much introspection on my own either, simply making it day to day. A lot of my functioning, as everybody else's, has been instinctual and bare-bones. I didn't go about picking my memory for these ones, either, but as they sometimes do as your subconscious processes things in the background, it simply came to me a moment ago while I was returning home, feet soaked from the melting snow outside. What a midwinter week it's proving to be.
Now, I haven't really looked at my childhood with any particular focus. In many ways I'm simply embarrassed to - I find myself, my past version, my child-self disagreeable to say the least, and would rather leave him in my past. My husband vehemently disagrees and still holds a desire to connect with that boy, but even in my metaphysical state of being all of me at once should I so choose, I am walling the boy in and my husband out. Frankly, it is not his place to pry, and I am not in the mood of regressing to be that child (ever again, but I'm leaving this open for Martin's sake.)
I don't exactly know how my story starts. I was born, and my parents loved me. My mother was a second-generation immigrant from a family that did not agree on her desire to marry outside of their community, and I believe they cut contact with her (and her husband, who I don't know if they ever so much as met) upon learning about their engagement. I suppose that was the point of no return; dating was something they could still debate on, express their opinion on, hoping to convince her to make a better choice. Engagement, plans to marry, a set date - that was seen as something of an open rejection of her family, an abandonment. So I never did meet my other grandparents. I know nothing about them. I don't even know what my last name could have been, if not for being what it is now, though I'm sure this is a detail I used to know but the universal strainer shed off of me as unimportant upon my death (as it was.) Furthermore, to a British boy raised by a perfectly English grandmother with a very deattached style of parenting, all that name would have been to me was... foreign. No attachments, no context, no cultural background to hang onto. No meaning beyond perhaps emphasising what I might have rather forgotten about: that where I lived was not the whole of my home, my heritage. I always did aspire to be typical.
I learned about a year ago that my experience of losing my parents does not align with the story of who I am that pre-exists my presence here. It was a huge shock, as up until then, I'd thought I was an exact copy, a... transfer, of a person who only existed in the written form here. It was the core of my identity: that I was this, and there was no difference. I was not divergent. Again, I suppose I simply wanted to be typical - expected - ordinary, insignificant, transparent so that I would not draw any attention, or God forbid, questions. What happened to me was that I was orphaned all at once by a car crash. I have a vision of it being in the winter, bad visibility, bad driving conditions, slippery wet roads. Whether this is the case, I don't know. It hardly matters. What mattered to me was that I was... young, I want to say three years old, at the time. My grandmother (father's side, as implied earlier) was taking care of me, I was supposed to stay for a night. A sleepover for me, an ordinary visit, a parental and grandparental duty, for her. I don't think she disliked me yet then. I wasn't her burden. I was probably an inconvenience she likely had little patience for, but in terms of how a grandmother feels upon taking on the responsibility of her own child's child, I believe she would have looked at it as a welcome inconvenience, not an inherently unpleasant one.
As it happens, that would become a permanent arrangement. I feel very little thinking about it. There is no emotional... anything, attached to this. It's unfortunate, I suppose. As a child, like most other orphans I suppose, I'd have emotional fits over the matter - imagining a better life where my mother doted on me, and my father taught me to play football in the backyard. (I don't think I would have liked football, but what do I know; that was part of my fantasies, that my obvious difference that always disappointed everyone around me was due to my unfortunate familial situation and the "trauma" of losing my parents, and if I'd only had my real family there, I would have grown up normal. For the record, I am as autistic as my father was, and I don't think either of us would have enjoyed football overly much.) I'd work myself up over it in the night and cry about my fantasy life, convincing myself that my present life was a tragedy in comparison to the perfect life I would have lived if only. Retrospectively, from my adult point of view, this is ridiculous of course. Yes, my family life would have likely been much better. My parents wanted me, my grandmother never did. That makes a difference to a child, even if the parental figure that despises them is not openly hostile towards them, and my grandmother never was. She was not abusive, merely detached, professional. It was her job that she had not wanted to look after me and raise me up to be a functional adult. She succeeded at it, more or less, and I never lacked in my life. I had a decent schooling, I had vacations, I had toys (though I don't know if I really knew how to play), I had games (which I enjoyed a great deal more), and I had books (so many books) to entertain and educate me. But I did not truly have much in terms of emotional support, though I learned the art of negotiating and making an argument for myself fairly soon to my life, which I think made me more well-suited for academia and later, my brief professional career, making up for some of my obvious social shortcomings. Our relationship was very much like that; professional, based in logical argumentation for and against, and the one who had a better argument for their stance would ultimately win in every case. My grandmother was never the kind of a person who'd order me and call it at that: I always had a voice in the decisions she made, even when I used it for ridiculousness only, which children are prone to do.
But in terms of my life being perfect in my born family - no. Like I said, I wasn't normal to begin with. Forget about the obviousness of my appearance, which I assume would have led me into enough trouble even if I was otherwise picture perfect; rather, it was my inner inability to assimilate with my peers and surroundings that made my life miserable. I can't tell if my grandmother was better or worse at raising an obviously disabled child than any other parent would have been. She'd done it before, and clearly did not like it, but she was adjusted to it and knew her way around it, and most mistakes she'd presumably already made with my father and knew to avoid with me. I felt rather comfortable at home as who I was and it truly did not occur to me most the time that I was so clearly lacking in some aspects that people are expected to inherently master outside my household. I didn't understand why my peers hated me. I decided I didn't care about it, that I was choosing my isolation; in fact, I did find most other children dull. I wasn't invested in their imaginative play, I found it... pointless, "childish" which of course is a much of muchness coming from a six years old, but if I had one ideal in life it was to be as much of an adult from diapers onwards as I possibly could. Like I mentioned before, I did have toys, but don't remember playing with them. I liked organising them, though. By colour and size, and I had a small collection of plastic and stuffed dinosaurs, which I would arrange and rearrange based on whichever criteria I found most appealing at the time. As a smaller child, it would be by the obvious characteristics (colour, size, as for others), and then from thereon, by whichever other characteristics I'd learned about, such as diet (herbivore, carnivore, omnivore), and finally by era. I did have a dinosaur phase as a child, and loved learning all about the timelines, eras, which dinosaur had coexisted with which, and it would upset me greatly when popular media made creative choices on these matters. You probably don't know the pain that I've felt witnessing most of the torturously inaccurate art that surrounds a boy child of a young age when it comes to dinosaurs. Monsters with bad anatomy tearing up other monsters with bad anatomy, each named and inspired by beasts that lived a million years apart from each other. (Have I told you yet that most people found me a terrible bore?)
I'm not sure where I was going with all of this. It sounds like I'm building up a story, but there's no conclusion here. This is as far as my memories take me and I've lost my point. Therefore, as presented: my early childhood.
Happy New Year.
(PS. Yes, I did also hate fireworks as a child. The noise would scare me. I have this in common with the group I'm with now.)
I'll spare you the recap. It's pointless. Too much has happened, in terms of our inner workings, and this is not our mental health blog to begin with - that thing is elsewhere, similarly ignored and abandoned in terms of any meaningful content (though we do like looking at pretty pictures, and at this point, it'll probably come as a surprise to our followers that we post about mental health to begin with when we start again.)
What I'm here for is... memories. I haven't really practiced much introspection on my own either, simply making it day to day. A lot of my functioning, as everybody else's, has been instinctual and bare-bones. I didn't go about picking my memory for these ones, either, but as they sometimes do as your subconscious processes things in the background, it simply came to me a moment ago while I was returning home, feet soaked from the melting snow outside. What a midwinter week it's proving to be.
Now, I haven't really looked at my childhood with any particular focus. In many ways I'm simply embarrassed to - I find myself, my past version, my child-self disagreeable to say the least, and would rather leave him in my past. My husband vehemently disagrees and still holds a desire to connect with that boy, but even in my metaphysical state of being all of me at once should I so choose, I am walling the boy in and my husband out. Frankly, it is not his place to pry, and I am not in the mood of regressing to be that child (ever again, but I'm leaving this open for Martin's sake.)
I don't exactly know how my story starts. I was born, and my parents loved me. My mother was a second-generation immigrant from a family that did not agree on her desire to marry outside of their community, and I believe they cut contact with her (and her husband, who I don't know if they ever so much as met) upon learning about their engagement. I suppose that was the point of no return; dating was something they could still debate on, express their opinion on, hoping to convince her to make a better choice. Engagement, plans to marry, a set date - that was seen as something of an open rejection of her family, an abandonment. So I never did meet my other grandparents. I know nothing about them. I don't even know what my last name could have been, if not for being what it is now, though I'm sure this is a detail I used to know but the universal strainer shed off of me as unimportant upon my death (as it was.) Furthermore, to a British boy raised by a perfectly English grandmother with a very deattached style of parenting, all that name would have been to me was... foreign. No attachments, no context, no cultural background to hang onto. No meaning beyond perhaps emphasising what I might have rather forgotten about: that where I lived was not the whole of my home, my heritage. I always did aspire to be typical.
I learned about a year ago that my experience of losing my parents does not align with the story of who I am that pre-exists my presence here. It was a huge shock, as up until then, I'd thought I was an exact copy, a... transfer, of a person who only existed in the written form here. It was the core of my identity: that I was this, and there was no difference. I was not divergent. Again, I suppose I simply wanted to be typical - expected - ordinary, insignificant, transparent so that I would not draw any attention, or God forbid, questions. What happened to me was that I was orphaned all at once by a car crash. I have a vision of it being in the winter, bad visibility, bad driving conditions, slippery wet roads. Whether this is the case, I don't know. It hardly matters. What mattered to me was that I was... young, I want to say three years old, at the time. My grandmother (father's side, as implied earlier) was taking care of me, I was supposed to stay for a night. A sleepover for me, an ordinary visit, a parental and grandparental duty, for her. I don't think she disliked me yet then. I wasn't her burden. I was probably an inconvenience she likely had little patience for, but in terms of how a grandmother feels upon taking on the responsibility of her own child's child, I believe she would have looked at it as a welcome inconvenience, not an inherently unpleasant one.
As it happens, that would become a permanent arrangement. I feel very little thinking about it. There is no emotional... anything, attached to this. It's unfortunate, I suppose. As a child, like most other orphans I suppose, I'd have emotional fits over the matter - imagining a better life where my mother doted on me, and my father taught me to play football in the backyard. (I don't think I would have liked football, but what do I know; that was part of my fantasies, that my obvious difference that always disappointed everyone around me was due to my unfortunate familial situation and the "trauma" of losing my parents, and if I'd only had my real family there, I would have grown up normal. For the record, I am as autistic as my father was, and I don't think either of us would have enjoyed football overly much.) I'd work myself up over it in the night and cry about my fantasy life, convincing myself that my present life was a tragedy in comparison to the perfect life I would have lived if only. Retrospectively, from my adult point of view, this is ridiculous of course. Yes, my family life would have likely been much better. My parents wanted me, my grandmother never did. That makes a difference to a child, even if the parental figure that despises them is not openly hostile towards them, and my grandmother never was. She was not abusive, merely detached, professional. It was her job that she had not wanted to look after me and raise me up to be a functional adult. She succeeded at it, more or less, and I never lacked in my life. I had a decent schooling, I had vacations, I had toys (though I don't know if I really knew how to play), I had games (which I enjoyed a great deal more), and I had books (so many books) to entertain and educate me. But I did not truly have much in terms of emotional support, though I learned the art of negotiating and making an argument for myself fairly soon to my life, which I think made me more well-suited for academia and later, my brief professional career, making up for some of my obvious social shortcomings. Our relationship was very much like that; professional, based in logical argumentation for and against, and the one who had a better argument for their stance would ultimately win in every case. My grandmother was never the kind of a person who'd order me and call it at that: I always had a voice in the decisions she made, even when I used it for ridiculousness only, which children are prone to do.
But in terms of my life being perfect in my born family - no. Like I said, I wasn't normal to begin with. Forget about the obviousness of my appearance, which I assume would have led me into enough trouble even if I was otherwise picture perfect; rather, it was my inner inability to assimilate with my peers and surroundings that made my life miserable. I can't tell if my grandmother was better or worse at raising an obviously disabled child than any other parent would have been. She'd done it before, and clearly did not like it, but she was adjusted to it and knew her way around it, and most mistakes she'd presumably already made with my father and knew to avoid with me. I felt rather comfortable at home as who I was and it truly did not occur to me most the time that I was so clearly lacking in some aspects that people are expected to inherently master outside my household. I didn't understand why my peers hated me. I decided I didn't care about it, that I was choosing my isolation; in fact, I did find most other children dull. I wasn't invested in their imaginative play, I found it... pointless, "childish" which of course is a much of muchness coming from a six years old, but if I had one ideal in life it was to be as much of an adult from diapers onwards as I possibly could. Like I mentioned before, I did have toys, but don't remember playing with them. I liked organising them, though. By colour and size, and I had a small collection of plastic and stuffed dinosaurs, which I would arrange and rearrange based on whichever criteria I found most appealing at the time. As a smaller child, it would be by the obvious characteristics (colour, size, as for others), and then from thereon, by whichever other characteristics I'd learned about, such as diet (herbivore, carnivore, omnivore), and finally by era. I did have a dinosaur phase as a child, and loved learning all about the timelines, eras, which dinosaur had coexisted with which, and it would upset me greatly when popular media made creative choices on these matters. You probably don't know the pain that I've felt witnessing most of the torturously inaccurate art that surrounds a boy child of a young age when it comes to dinosaurs. Monsters with bad anatomy tearing up other monsters with bad anatomy, each named and inspired by beasts that lived a million years apart from each other. (Have I told you yet that most people found me a terrible bore?)
I'm not sure where I was going with all of this. It sounds like I'm building up a story, but there's no conclusion here. This is as far as my memories take me and I've lost my point. Therefore, as presented: my early childhood.
Happy New Year.
(PS. Yes, I did also hate fireworks as a child. The noise would scare me. I have this in common with the group I'm with now.)
