pulling apart my mind

[kipper]

I was always a very intelligent child growing up. Learning has always been easy for me and I rarely had to put forth effort to get A's and B's. On the standardized tests we were given once a year, my scores were always 98% or 99% for all the sections of the test. Early on in gradeschool I was given an IQ test and labeled as one of the "gifted" kids. At our school this meant that once every two weeks we spent the whole day in the gifted classroom where we were allowed to teach ourselves under the guidence of the gifted teacher.

Physically I was one of the smallest kids. I was never into sports and didn't play in the daily soccer/softball/whatever game that almost all of the other boys played at recess. It wasn't so much a lack of skills as I just didn't know to play and had no interrest in learning. I did get into karate though somewhere around 2nd grade and spent many years at it. In karate I learned to avoid fighting at all costs. So even though I wasn't scared or imtimidated I would always try to back down from a fight. There were only a couple of times throughout gradeschool when I had to fight and each of these times I kicked ass like no kid my age could.

My social life as a kid I found very confusing to look back at. Before making a serrious inventory of my memory's I would have said that I was mostly a loner near the bottom of the social ladder. I saw my childhood as an endless procession of being picked on and harrased by kids my own age. For most of my school years I felt tormented, and gradually withdrew. My grades steadily fell along with my self-image until I ended up finding my way into the stoner crowd in highschool. Drinking led to smoking pot led to doing coke led to rehad led to dropping acid led to meth led to etc... finally leading to the present day me, 32 years old, broke, jobless, down to one friend, and generally confused about how my life got this way.

The thing that didn't make sense though was my self-image. It just didn't seem right somehow so I started trying to remember everything I could about my childhood to see if I could figure things out. At first the stuff I remembered backed up my bad self-image. I remembered times I was teased mercilessly by girls in highschool, or called names like "pizzaface" for being the first kid in gradeschool to get pimples. I went from highschool back and recalled all the bad experiences that I thought had led to my low self-esteem. I realised that I was focusing on just the negative things and decided to try remembering things starting from pre-school and kindergarden and work my way up. Back then I was one of the most popular kids and I never felt picked on or tormented.

Something had definately gone wrong somewhere to turn the happy outgoing child I had been into the lonely avoidant personality of today. Something more than the normal bullying and teasing that everybody faces growing up and something that happened long before the drugs started. I went grade by grade and remembered everything I could - teacher's, girls, fights, friends, everything. For each grade I also tried to remember my social status with my peers. I figured that I could use social standing to see where and when my downward trend happened and then figure out why.

What I discovered by doing this was something I had never expected. The more I remembered the more I had to accept that the only thing that went downhill in my childhood was my own self-image. I was actually very popular throughout my school years without ever noticing it. I had never been the outcast social leper that I felt I was. I even remembered times when other kids had tried to make me see this. At the time though I always took it as just another cruel painfull joke being played on me by the popular kids. Some of my most painfull memory's of being bullied and teased were really just kids being genuinely kind by trying to help me see things the right way.

My memory's from childhood are pretty clear. While my understanding of a particular memory changes, the actual events stay the same. I found that up until I started getting high I could come up with at least a page worth of memory's for each grade, even as far back as pre-school. Third grade was different though, third grade was a blank. I couldn't remember one thing about that whole year. Looking back at my memory's I saw that after third grade was when I started being self-conscious and sliding down into my own personal hell. This all pointed to something happening to me in the third grade that was so painfull and horrible that I had blocked it out and then withdrawn into myself.

I dug up old photo's and crap to help me remember that year. A few unattached and confusing memory's started to fit in. It's hard to describe it. All my other memory's seemed to be in some kind of order, this leads to that and so on. All of these third grade memory's were things that lied outside the chain and had some really confused feelings attached to them.

This is the one that gave me chills and made me really start to think that something truly horrible was locked away inside me. There was this kid who lived a few houses away from me. He was in the next grade and since I had alot of older friends I had heard story's about him. He was the kid at the absolute bottom of the social ladder. The kid who get's tormented to tears every day and in every way by everybody his own age. I think I became became friends with him because he was so needy and desperate. He'd practically give me anything just to have somebody to play with for a few hours. Since nobody talked to him beyond calling him names, he had no connection to gradeschool society. I filled his head with all sorts of weird lies about myself. I really don't see how anybody could have believed some of it, but he alway's seemed convinced. I told him that I had a twin brother that caused trouble wherever he went. Then I started going over to his house as my imaginary twin. I would wear this vest I had with no tshirt underneith and ripped up jeans. I saw my twin as the opposite of the real me. In alot of ways my "twin" was like Fonzie from Happy Day's. He was cool... AYE!!! lol

Here's comes the creepy part of all this. One day I went over to his house in Fonzie mode and in my cold detached Fonzie way of talking and seeing life told that him that my brother (the real me) was dead. I don't remember the details of my death, just that it had something to do with "Fonzie" me committing some kind of crime (I think robbery but I'm not sure). After the getaway the cops saw the real me walking along the road and thinking it was Fonzie me shot him in the head. As it turned out this kid really liked the real me because I was the only person who ever played with him. He started bawling and got really upset and sad over the whole thing. Since crying wasn't "cool" the Fonzie me had to go at that point.

As I remember it, I was fully aware of this all just being an elaborate burn on my loser neighbor. I knew that my Fonzie twin was imaginary and that I was just acting. I never talked to that kid again after that, and I never told anybody about what I had done either. It just doesn't make sense then that it was all just some cruel joke I was playing since the only person that ever knew what was going on was me. Looking back on this memory, I can't help seeing it as a huge red flag with the words "PSYCHO!" printed on it.

Well I kept whittling away at third grade and found a few more weird things that I did that year. What's interresting about it is that all these memory's were there before, they've just always been disconnected from eachother. Seen individually this stuff was just weird shit I did to entertain myself as a kid. But putting them together as a sequence of weird shit makes them seem much different. The more I fit these memory's into the overall fabric of my life the more things go "click" and make sense.



There's plenty more but I'm sick of typing for now...

[gLoo]

OMG that was a mean "burn"

hmm... but i never thought of backtracking my life and trying to figure out where things got f*cked up.

[wakeryder]

i never thought about it eather

[kipper]

Yeah, that was a pretty mean thing to do. I honestly haven't thought about it that way before. I bet that contributed to do the paranoid "out to get me" viewpoint I developed.

God, the more I think about it the worse I feel. I killed that kids bestfriend... even if it was me. Like I said, I had some serrious issues that year.


I can't say I'd recomend the self-therapy. I really had no choice since I'm totally broke and pretty much one step away from moving into a cardboard box. My only options were to do it myself or just give up and go crazy-hobo.

[I am Jack's wasted life]

Wow...you probably caused that kid some real psychological damage...

However, at the time you were young so you shouldn't think too deeply into it. What's past is past and you should learn from it.

[Bodhi]

Thats quite a story. I too have looked back on my past and tried to figure out where I started becoming shy. Because I also remember being fairly outgoing and popular in elementary school. Yet as I went to middle and high school it seems I changed and had less friends and was more introverted. Many of my friends in elementary school I stopped being friends with them and they became the popular crowd in high school. I don't know exactly when I became the very shy person I am now.

I also have thought back to elementary school as when I started having trouble with girls. I remember the first girl I had a crush on. For most of the year I really liked her but didn't talk to her much or tell her how I felt. I did tell some of my friends about how I liked her(something nowadays I would never do) and then one day one of my friends told some other kid who when he found out threatened to tell the girl. I realized then I had to tell the girl myself so that day on the playground i walked up to her and told her how I felt. Yet now looking back I can not remember what she said or did after I said that. I know we never became a couple(if you could even at that age) and she moved away the next year. So I think now maybe she said something really harsh or laughed or did something so negative I am repressing the memory. Also I think maybe that experience scarred me so that now I can not go up to girls and talk to them very easily or ask them out. Maybe that experience has nothing to do with my current problems with girls but maybe it does. After that high school and college there have been girls I had crushs on and I never could get the courage to talk to them. Maybe if in my childhood I had a positive experience with a girl I would have had more courage in later years to talk to them.

[kipper]

Bodhi395 said:

I did tell some of my friends about how I liked her(something nowadays I would never do) and then one day one of my friends told some other kid who when he found out threatened to tell the girl. I realized then I had to tell the girl myself so that day on the playground i walked up to her and told her how I felt. Yet now looking back I can not remember what she said or did after I said that. I know we never became a couple(if you could even at that age) and she moved away the next year. So I think now maybe she said something really harsh or laughed or did something so negative I am repressing the memory.

I think these memory blanks point to the important stuff you need to uncover and understand. I bet her reaction wasn't half as harsh as you think. I did the secret crush thing most of my life too and the lesson there is that secret crushes are a waste of time/energy/life and almost always turn out really bad.

I believe that the most important things you learn in gradeschool are the emotional and social lessons The book learning is mostly just busy work. The real teacher in gradeschool is Nature. The only way to learn these lessons is by doing them and getting hurt. The thing that's so bad about secret crushes is that the longer the crush the deeper in "love" you fall. The more in love you fall the more painful it is if she doesn't recipricate and the more you're likely to be just eventually give up.

I think that at least on a subconscious level that kid who threatened to tell her knew this and was passing the lesson along to you by forcing you into the confrontation.



My problem actually turned out to be that I was molested by one of my parents friends sons. He was a few years older than me. It never went beyond fondling, thankfully. I didn't understand what was going on but I do remember feeling obligated somehow to go along with it. I've alway's remembered this but it was in another one of those weirdly detached timelines, like that kid I pulled the Fonzie trick on.

Anyway that leads to the memory that I eventually dug out from third grade that so royally screwed up my head for the next 20 years. Me and a neighbor boy were caught playing in his room naked by his mom. She flipped out. She dragged me home and told my mother. Then she called and told her husband and he went on to make sure that all the parents around my house found out. Suddenly I was banned from playing with all the kids who lived around me.

The thing of it was that nobody ever explained to me why it was such a bad thing. My mother, being the good sexually-repressed Catholic she was, didn't explain any of it. She just bought me a bunch of Beverly Cleary books and told me not to go around playing naked with people.

A few months later when I started showing interrest in some of the neighborhood girls she gave me the "talk". For her that meant telling me that touching and kissing were wrong and I wasn't to be doing it.

I ended up a confused, frustrated, and deeply scared little kid. The next year, after I'd learned to lie and sneak around my mother to "gow out" with this girl down the street, my chance at a first kiss came and I couldn't do it. Kissing and touching were bad, I knew that even though I had no idea why. The memory had already been blocked out. That's pretty much been the story since then. I never understood it until I remembered that neighbor boy incident.



Enough typing for today... my brain hurts