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.
