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About Me

 

 

As a younger man, I envisioned myself as someone who would change the world—a compelling fantasy that has gradually been eroded by many years of failure.  With thirty coming on way too quickly, I’ve come to understand a few things about myself.  Lacking the talent to produce the great works of literature I once saw in my future, or sufficient ambition to overcome that shortfall, my life is destined to be ordinary.

 

This isn’t such a bad thing.  Hell, any reasonable person might accuse me of whining over sour grapes just for bringing it up.  But I suffer from a mild, most likely clinical depression that makes facing my life without grandiose fantasies…well…depressing.

 

The sappy shit, in brief, is this: My mom was nuts.  Schizophrenic, talked to people who weren’t there, had conspiracy theories about my dad being an imposter—that kind of nuts.  My dad, unable to cope with this, drank.  He wasn’t the typical drunk, fortunately.  He drank to pass out.  Coupled with his long hours, for the first ten years of my life he basically didn’t exist.

 

Mom, being nuts, couldn’t handle me.  The easiest way to keep me quiet was to feed me.  So I was horrendously overweight by the time I entered school.  You can guess what my classmates did with that.  I was an instant outcast—the butt of every joke.  My only friends were nerds in similar positions of social disgrace.

 

My mom died when I was ten.  Dad quit drinking and I got thinner—enough to let me fade into the background in high school.  Of course the prior years had done plenty of damage to my self-esteem and social skills.  My friends were still all outcasts, and I was never really able to handle the social structure of high school.  I cut class a lot—eventually dropped out for good my senior year.

 

It could’ve been worse, really.  I had a myriad of self-esteem and social adjustment issues, but I didn’t become an alcoholic or a drug addict, or come back to kill my classmates, or any of that nonsense.  I’ve never used my childhood problems as an excuse for my failures in adulthood.  In fact, as a very early age I made a conscious effort to use them to my advantage.

 

There’s this idea in sociology about socialization—the process by which we find roles within different groups in our lives.  This is something I have a real problem with, even now.  I’m terrified of social situations.  It takes me a long time to get comfortable with new people, and it’s rare that I truly connect with anyone.  In fact, I would say that outside of my family, the only person I really connect with is my wife.

 

So basically, this whole socialzation process is something I don’t get involved with.  And here’s the thing about socialization: You pick up a lot of crap with it—stuff that defines your universe.

 

Take the simplest example: If you’re brought up as a Christian, you’re socialized into a group of other Christians—say the group of people you go to church with.  In that process, you are instilled with all kinds of ideas about things.  How to behave, what’s right and wrong, why the universe is the way it is, who God is…etc.  A lot of the groups we end up being socialized in come with this philosophical baggage.  Political groups, family groups…  These influences become a substantial part of the mosaic that makes up how we look at the world.

 

I don’t think people understand this for the most part.  But look at it this way: In the United States, we find the thought of eating dog to be sickening.  In China, however, it’s perfectly normal.  Why?  Because the socialization process is different.  If you’d been socialized in China, you’d think nothing of eating a dog.  Just like if you’d been socialized into Indian culture, the thought of eating cow would turn your stomach.

 

For as strongly as we may feel about these things, there’s no tangible reason why eating one animal is more right or wrong than eating some other.  They’re simply differences in culture.  I personally think about 90% of the way we look at the world is purely cultural, rather than choice.

 

From this, I derived my theory about why I had the potential to produce earth-shattering, mind-altering works of literature:

 

As someone who failed miserably at many aspects of the socialization process, I had significantly less cultural baggage than the average person.  This, in theory, gave me the ability to look rationally at various ideas, rather than approaching them with preconceptions.  I would be able to discover the truth beyond the dogma.

 

So basically, I’ve spent my adolescent and adult life trying to figure out what it all really means.  Here’s what I’ve figured out: Socialization is important.

 

I think there has to be a link between socialization problems and depression.  Because much of the source of my depression is not really being able to believe in anything.  I don’t know what anything means or what anything is about, which probably wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t end up thinking about it so much—or believed it was important that I figure something out about it.

 

How much easier it would be if I simply had a predetermined, preconceived worldview that answered my questions beyond any desire to ask them.  I envy the religious people.  Not their dogmatic insistence on spreading moral values based in an unaccredited two-thousand year old book—but their clarity of thought and purpose.  The structure of the universe makes sense to them, and their role within it is clear.  I envy that.

 

All this rambling arrives at a simple point: I have this nagging feeling that I ought to be thinking about these things, ought to figure something about them, and ought to be sharing those conclusions with the human race.  This was the basis of my many novel attempts.  I’m more and more convinced I’m not going to discover anything new or interesting about the human condition—or that if I do, I’ll be creative enough to express it compellingly.  But I still have the desire, and so now I have this blog.  This shall be the official repository for the slivers of my creative soul that have survived my long and painful descent in the reality of my insignificance.

 

Enjoy.

 

 

 

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