On Loneliness: My Upbringing

You’ll have to be patient with me on this series. Writing about this stuff is a struggle for me. It’s hard to order my thoughts into coherent paragraphs. Also, thinking about all of it brings up a lot of bad feelings. The series will be finished eventually, however, no matter how much I occasionally consider abandoning it.

I come from a very small family. For most of my childhood, it was just me, my mom, and my two older brothers against the world.

My parents divorced before I turned two. My dad was never around much after that, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. People occasionally say to me, “You never mention your dad.” That’s because he’s a self-absorbed alcoholic and a pathological liar. He’s fairly harmless but essentially a waste of space. He paid the child support and, until his mom died, saw us maybe once or twice per year. Other than that, he’s AWOL to this day.

Both of my maternal grandparents died pretty young – my grandma about five months before I was born & my grandpa when I was two. My paternal grandma did her best to be a part of our lives. I think that she struggled with financial constraints, though, on top of living several towns away from us. We simply didn’t see each other as much as we would have liked. She died the summer I turned twelve.

My mom & dad each had a brother, both of whom were married and had two children each. However, we never spent a lot of time with either of their families. I grew up without ever really knowing my four cousins. If I saw them on the street now, I probably wouldn’t recognize them.

I’m telling you all of this because I want you to know that when I say I’ve been lonely for most of my life, you can see why that is: growing up, I didn't have a lot of people on my side, so to speak. And while we had little to do with our extended family, the gap that they left wasn't exactly filled with friends.

My mom had a lot of quirks. She didn’t like to ask for help from anyone. We struggled financially when I was really young, so I grew up pretty poor. Mom didn’t like for people to know how much we struggled, so we virtually never had people over to the house. She was very sensitive. She felt slighted easily. She often took things people said the wrong way, something she and I butted heads about continually once I reached adulthood (she always thought I was secretly saying something I wasn’t, which made it difficult for me to talk to her about anything). I think this is why she herself didn’t have very many friends. She never encouraged us to make friends either. When I did make friends, she never seemed to like them.

I feel like I grew up without ever being properly socialized. I spent a lot of time with my brothers and their friends (other boys from the neighborhood). I really only had one close childhood friend, the girl who lived across the street. My brothers and I virtually never engaged in any extracurricular activities like Scouts or camp or sports. We could never afford them. As a child, I never had a birthday party with friends. I never had a sleepover or went to one. We never left our neighborhood much, except to go to school.

At school, I excelled academically but struggled to make friends. Adults loved me. Kids thought I was weird. I was very shy, introverted and bookish. Due to our monetary issues, I often wore my brothers’ hand-me-downs and probably wasn’t as clean as most other kids (my mom was so ultra-frugal that she kept utility bills down in part by not allowing us to bathe every day). Also, being fatherless was still a bit of an oddity back in the early 80s. The teasing didn’t really begin in earnest until I reached junior high – when kids turn especially evil – but by then pretty much everything was wrong with me: I was poor; I wasn’t even remotely cool; I was too skinny; I had a stupid last name; I wasn’t attractive (seriously: my “awkward phase” lasted well into adulthood). I simply didn’t fit in.

I basically grew up feeling like a social reject and I was too socially inept to figure out how to fix it. I couldn’t wait to move away from my hometown for good. Nowadays, my acquaintances always seem surprised when I give them a truncated version of my sad childhood. “How did you turn out so normal?” I’ve had people ask. It makes me laugh. I don’t feel normal at all; I guess I’ve just gotten good at acting that way. Not that I’m not genuine. I really am as nice and friendly as I appear to be. On the inside, however, I always feel a little lost in social situations. “Did I just say/do the wrong thing?” I frequently wonder. “Does that person even like me?”

It makes me sad to think that you can never truly outgrow the way you were brought up no matter how hard you try. Believe me, I’ve tried pretty hard. I went through several rounds of therapy in my 20s. I feel the strongest now – mentally and emotionally – that I’ve ever felt. But the self-doubt never goes away completely. Some part of me will always feel like that lonely loser nerd who grew up with hardly any friends.

And that's pretty much that, in a nutshell. If I have a tendency toward loneliness, it's only because I've been lonely since I was a kid. As we'll see in the next part of the series, however, my checkered experience with friendships hasn't exactly helped the matter. 

I'll see you for that some time in the next few weeks.