13 lines
3.3 KiB
Plaintext
13 lines
3.3 KiB
Plaintext
Date: 03 Jan 2012 04:07
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Topic: The Drowning Pool Of My Adolescence
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Modified: 09 Jan 2012 04:15
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I thought I would have more to say about my adolescence and early adulthood. I can’t remember much of it, though. I spent the better portion of it lost in a fog of rage, humiliation, self-denial, and intense bitterness. I don’t have many memories of those years. Those that I do have, are either angry, or sad.
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Throughout the length of my life in middle and high school, I avoided social gatherings of all kinds but one: music. It was the only thing I clung to for the sheer joy of it. I hid amongst the choir so as not to appear too satisfied, and to minimize my visibility to my parents. But even this pastime was not beyond the reach of self-destruction. When I quit college at age 20, years of accumulated sheet music, tape recordings, stuff I’d written myself, and study materials went into a dumpster behind the supermarket near my father’s home.
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My friendships were sparse. I had one friend in middle school. The entire relationship constituted me riding my bicycle to his house on Saturdays to watch MASH marathons on UHF television. I had one friend in high school. A brilliant violinist, actually. Someone much like myself. He could never quite put his heart into his music. If he had, his own mother would have torn him to shreds. As a result, he was never able to love it. After 5 years of scholarship funded schooling, he abandoned music for a career in I.T. and real estate. Again, much like me, only more motivated.
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I regarded girls with intense suspicion and contempt. They were eager to return the sentiment. In fact, they were happy to validate all my fears. Because I’d taken up my own fear of females as a kind of moral sword, or personal “super-power”, it strangely enough did give me a kind power most other boys did not have. I took great pride in the fact that I drove girls away from me. Each encounter reminded me of my promise under my breath to my parents. The more intense the overtures from girls around me, the more intense was my smugness, anger, and disgust. This provoked a great deal of anger and contempt in them in response. Pubescent girls don’t cotton to open rejection in an environment where every male is expected by default to pursue you with a degree of vigor determined mostly by your level of physical attractiveness and popularity. I spurned them all equally. Thus, I was fed a steady diet of ridicule and contempt that scaled with the relative desirability of the girl, and my own smugness. It was both a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a self-reciprocating system. The more I rejected, the more I was rejected. The more I was rejected, the more “evidence” I had, that I was “right”.
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Below all of this noise, of course, I was swimming in a deep pool of despair, loneliness, and isolation. I had only a couple social connections outside of my family, and neither the strength nor the motivation to maintain them. The older I got, the harder it was to tread water. I nearly drowned in high school, but I don’t think I was fully submerged until I my 21st birthday. That was the year I decided to join the army. That summer, I dropped out of college, tossed all my work into a trash dumpster behind the local grocery store, and joined the army on the Delayed Entry Program. I wasn’t in-processed until February of the following year. |