Final Summation...

Goddammit I hate memory sometimes.

And everything it leads to.  Nostalgia.  Reminiscence.  A concrete sense of Self.  Rambling, confessional blog posts about supposed childhood sexual traumas.  And so forth.

After all that, after my whole humiliating confessional frenzy here in my last few posts (holy crap, was that all the way back in February??), I have to admit now that I'm not entirely sure my memory of these early experiences is even correct.  And I've wanted to write and post this explanation for a good while now, because those posts are still sitting there on the front page, like a severed head at a dinner party; but I've been alternately too busy, or, mostly, too embarrassed by the whole ordeal to want to return to it.  But I can't just leave that shit up there for anyone to read without any context or resolution.  I have to put this to bed.

So here's how it all started.  I was driving to work that February morning, and there was a discussion on the radio of how children respond to parental abuse.  I don't remember what it was exactly, but something they said reminded me of this childhood friend (I'm going to start calling him "Bill" just so that I have a name to refer to him by).  I hadn't thought about Bill in many, many years.  I remembered some of our experiences together, and I remembered his big, angry father.  And that's when I suddenly made the connection and realized, "Oh!  Bill was abused by his father!"  And everything else just followed from that.

I still believe that to be true; I believe Bill was abused (at least mentally and emotionally, if not physically or sexually) by his father.  But the rest of it, I must admit now, I am significantly less sure about.  I know that Bill and I "played doctor," but I don't remember all that we did.  I don't actually remember how far our sexual play went. And, I am forced to admit to myself and all of you now, I don't actually remember who suggested what.  I thought I did at the time, but I've since realized that's not true.  It was just too long ago now for me to remember it clearly.  It was so long ago that even the things I do remember clearly are suspect.  And through my research I discovered that I would be forced to admit something else, something much worse:  it is entirely possible that I am the one who abused him.

Reading through literature on the subject, I was surprised to find out that one of the more common, and yet least often discussed, forms of childhood sexual abuse is to simply educate a child about sex too much at too early an age.  (It had never even occurred to me before my research that this could possibly be considered a form of abuse.)  Sex is one of the most complicated and complex of all human interactions, and a 4 or 5 year-old child is simply too underdeveloped to be able to fully understand it (hell, a lot of adults are too underdeveloped to be able to fully understand it, for that matter); and so therefore giving a child that age too much information on the subject can often lead them to act out behaviors that they are not able to fully understand, process, or deal with in a meaningful way.  That's the basic idea.

My mother's policy was that if I was old enough to ask the question, then I was old enough to hear the answer.  And she was always very quick to let me know that if I ever had any questions at all, she would do her best to try to answer them truthfully and completely.  And she lived by that statement.  And I was a very curious boy.  I had a lot of questions.  And she answered every one she could.  So I remember that throughout my childhood, basically until high school, I always knew more about sex (among many other things) than any of my friends or classmates seemed to.  I was proud of that, actually.  It made me feel grown-up.  It made me feel strong.  And superior.  (Realizing now, as I type this, that this may have something to do with why I value intelligence so highly, in both myself and others.)

But in terms of my memories of my experiences with Bill, that throws everything into a new light.  I only actually remember one thing we did that was definitely Bill's idea, and while that was a little dirty, it also wasn't exactly sexual, either (we were naked, but there was no touching); it would fall squarely in the category of "normative childhood sexual play."  I don't actually remember what else we may have done, or who might've suggested any of it.  But I know that in my memories of all the other boys (and some girls) who came after Bill, I was definitely the aggressor.

The hard part to admit, is that when I suddenly realized that morning that Bill had been abused by his father, I didn't then "realize" that he had actually been acting out his abuse on me, as I originally wrote.  No, the truth was that I actually just assumed that was the case, and didn't recognize that I was making an assumption.  "OMG, Bill was abused by his father!  What do abused children do?  They act out that same abuse on others.  He must've been doing that to me when we played doctor!  So that's why I then went on to do it others; I was acting out his abuse on me!  That's where it all started!  It makes perfect sense."  And it does make perfect sense.  But that doesn't automatically make it true, either.

I still don't know what happened back then, and I probably never will.  But I have to admit that the much more likely scenario seems to be that I was actually a victim of childhood sexual abuse, but the abuser was my mother, not Bill.  And it seems much more likely that I was acting out my abuse on him (and all the other boys and girls that came after him) rather than the other way around.

Bill moved away before we even hit puberty.  I haven't seen or heard from him since I was a child.  I have no idea what his life has been like.

If you're still out there, "Bill," I hope you're okay.  And if you're not... all I can say is, I'm so, so sorry.

It wasn't my fault.  I was only a child.

Apparent Exaggerations...

Still need more time to write out the full story/explanation, but I did learn something that requires an immediate update.

I knew that the language I used yesterday didn't feel quite right.  It seemed inflammatory, and loaded with a ton of connotations that were not actually part of the experience I was trying to communicate.  But what other language was I supposed to use?  How else was I supposed to describe it?

Well, finally getting around last night to doing some very preliminary research into the topic of child-on-child sexual abuse, revealed the rather obvious fact that I'm not the only person in the world who has ever had experiences like these, and that as such, there is already a whole lexicon available to me to describe it, if I had only bothered to look.

I learned right off the bat that I was not, in fact, molested.  I was not abused.  What happened to me would be characterized as "Normative Childhood Sexual Play," even if it was a little more advanced than most.  The difference being, I was never coerced, or threatened, or manipulated, or made to do anything I didn't want to do.  All this friend of mine did was suggest the ideas; I went along with them willingly, even excitedly.  And I enjoyed them completely, to the point that I then went on to suggest them to all my other friends for the next 20 years.

What I went through was a normal part of growing up that pretty much everyone goes through at some point.  The big difference for me, was that it happened to me about 10 years earlier than the average.  I was regularly having sex in elementary school, and I was having the kind of sex that most other people don't even know about, much less start trying to engage in, until middle school or high school.  (Oddly, I steadfastly maintained my virginity, however technical, until I was much older; I think having so much sex as a child made my virginity seem more precious to me somehow, and I was determined to save it until I found someone I really loved.)

I still think my friend was abused, though.  It's the only explanation I have right now for how he could be so sexually aggressive, and adventurous, and knowledgeable, at such a young age.  And so it's still possible that, from his point of view, he was acting out from his history of abuse.  But whether he was attempting to abuse me or not (who knows how he would've responded if I'd said no), I wasn't abused.  I went willingly, and loved every minute of it.

And while I feel a lot better now, knowing that I don't actually have to wear the "childhood sexual abuse victim" label for the rest of my life, there's still a lot left here that I need to unpack.  I'm still not sure what all this means, or what I'm supposed to do with this new information.

We Are What We Remember We Are...

I realized this morning, that I was - rather technically, I must caveat - molested by one of my very first childhood friends.  And that this series of events was directly responsible for shaping a very large portion of my personality; of who I still am today.

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this.  There's way too much story there to be able to tell it all right now.  But I had to at least get this much, the realization of it, the acknowledgment of it, out of me and into existence, before I forgot it again, or subsumed it in some other way.

I feel like I'm supposed to be upset about this.  But I don't think I feel particularly upset about it, at least not yet.  (There is a small part of me, however, that is upset at myself for not being upset about it, for whatever that's worth.)  I'd always remembered - and still remember - our "playing doctor" as being entirely consensual.  (As much as it could be, at least.  We were about the same age at the time, so technically, legally, neither of us could consent; but we were also the only ones involved.  So how does that work?)  So, I've never felt - and still don't feel - victimized in any way.  I feel no enmity or ill-will towards this individual, and never have.  And the parts of my Self that I can now suddenly attribute to my early friendship with this person (at least, the ones I know about) are not things that I've ever felt particularly bad about or wished to be different.  Nor have I ever felt a need to investigate their root, or determine their origin.

Which I guess is part of why it feels so strange to suddenly know where they all come from.  I received an answer to an absolutely massive question, before I had ever even asked it in the first place.  There's an almost vertigo to it; the sensation of it makes you dizzy.  A memory you've had for almost 40 years, and suddenly, from out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, one tiny little detail you'd left behind somewhere along the way comes back into focus; and it fits like a keystone into place with all the other memories it connects to:  that time, that place, those people; filling in a hole you never knew was there; and now you see it all so clearly, understanding it all for the very first time, after 40 years; and that realization leads to another, which leads to another, cascading down through your history like a line of dominoes, until suddenly four decades of Self have been re-written.  You understand yourself now in a new, better, more complete way, a more whole way, than you ever have before.  But you also know now, that you're not who you thought you were; and you never have been.  So, then, who are you?

That's kind of a lot to handle when it all hits you in a matter of seconds while you're driving down the highway late to work on a Monday morning.

So, yeah.  This one's gonna take a while to unpack, I guess.

Gaze Deep Into My Navel And Despair...

How am I supposed to grow up?

I want to grow up.  I really do.  No, more than that, I need to.  I need to grow the fuck up.  I'm almost forty years old, but I still see myself as if I were twenty-five.  That might sound appealing on some level, at first; "young at heart" and all that.  And maybe it would be, if that's what I wanted for myself.  But it isn't.  I want to grow up.  I need to grow up, because I can't keep living like I'm twenty-five.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.  I can't eat like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't move like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't party like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  Fuck, I can't even sleep like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  It all hurts me now in a way that it never did, and I can feel myself breaking down at an astonishing rate, as if the force of Entropy inside me were being fed by some radioaction of chemical combustion.  Accelerated Decrepitude.  But on the other hand, trying to live within my almost-forty means, while still feeling like a twenty-five year-old inside, is so monumentally depressing that I can't even fucking bother; I always just end up feeling like I already have one foot in the grave.

A twenty-five year-old trapped in a forty year-old body.  How incredibly pathetic.  How incredibly modern.  How incredibly privileged.

But how am I supposed to grow up?  I don't know.  My observations tell me that for most people, this happens as a natural side-effect of breeding.  That creating a child shifts all perspectives, and forces the new parent into a maturity that cannot be achieved through any other means.  That makes sense to me.  I can understand that.

But I'm never going to have any children.  So what am I supposed to do?  How am I supposed to force myself to achieve a state that, for most people, requires quite possibly the single most life-altering event they will ever experience in order to achieve?

Sometimes I think, maybe I don't actually need to grow up?  If I don't have any children, then what do I need to grow up for?  Why do I feel this need anyways?  I can only assume it is because I reflexively compare my life to the model my parents set for me.  When I look at myself, and try to judge whether I'm doing well or not, I compare it to the life they lived.  And I always feel myself coming up short.

They went to college.  They got degrees.  They worked hard.  (My father still works harder than almost anyone else I know, and while my mother never worked as hard as he did, she still inarguably worked harder than I do now.)  They bore and raised children.  They owned houses, with yards and multiple floors and everything.

But I dropped out of college.  I have no degrees, and probably never will.  Yeah, I have a career that doesn't leave me wanting to kill myself, but I still hate it, just because it's work, and I hate work of any kind; I hate being forced to sell myself every day in order to sustain myself.  I don't own a house.  I own an absurdly tiny condo that I hate and will never be able to sell for as much as I paid for it.  I am almost certain I will end up having to live in that tiny little box for the rest of my life, watching it deteriorate around me, with me - and that thought terrifies me on a regular basis.

And even these modest achievements - a well-paying job that I can sort of do well and tolerate, and a tiny little condo I'm trapped in like a prison cell - even these barely note-worthy accomplishments I never actually earned; I didn't work hard to achieve these things.  I got this job because some well-meaning middle-aged women that I worked with took pity on me, and talked to their bosses, and told them they knew this kid they thought would do well as a programmer.  And they were right - I am a good programmer.  At least, I'm alright.  But again, not because I try to be, or because I studied or worked hard or went to school or anything else.  I just have a natural talent for logic and pattern recognition and symbology, and so I am a naturally decent programmer.  I could be a great programmer if I wanted to be; if I tried to be and put forth the effort.  But I don't.  Because I don't care.  I only want to put forth the minimum amount of effort to get by, and save the rest for indulging in my life's pleasures.

And it's a similar story with my "home."  I didn't work hard and save money every day so that I could eventually put a down payment on my dream home.  My grandfather died, and since my mother (his daughter) was already dead herself, the portion of his life's wealth that should have been hers (and he had worked hard all his life to achieve that wealth) came to me instead.  And I used all of that money to buy the apartment I had been living in for almost a decade at that point.  The biggest, most "adult" accomplishment of my life - becoming a home-owner - and it only happened because I was in a position to profit off of the deaths of two of my close family members.  And so it has never felt like an accomplishment to me.  It feels like blood money.

(It's true that I performed magick to get the job and the money and the apartment, but even taking the assumption that my magick worked doesn't help the situation any.  Magick is a short-cut.  It's easy compared to actually working hard to learn or to save money.  And it's fun to do, and for that reason alone I wanted to do it, whether it worked or not.  So even assuming that I came by these things through sorcery, it still doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me.  It still doesn't feel like I really earned them.  It feels like I cheated.)

And I will almost certainly never see that much money again in my lifetime.  I can barely maintain a savings of more than a couple of thousand dollars at a time.  I live paycheck-to-paycheck, even with my fairly significant salary.  I've always been that way.  If I have money, I want to spend it on making myself feel good right now, and I can't seem to deny myself comfort or happiness in the present, in order to save it for some undefined future.  As I've written here before, I feel like the Grasshopper, fiddling away as the first snow begins to fall.

But why do I determine the value of my life by comparing it to my parents'?  They were completely different people, living in a completely different time.  And who wanted completely different things from their life than I want from mine.  And I know this.  But I still can't shake this feeling that I am somehow failing at life, because I seem to remember my parents being so much better off in their twenties than I am in my thirties; or will be in my forties.  I just want to be happy, like anyone else.  But I constantly and consistently feel that the things that make me happy aren't good for me.  That they are self-indulgent, or immature, or masturbatory.  That I am a bad person for living my life the way that I do.  But trying to live my life any other way always leaves me just as miserable, if only in a different way.

I just want to spend my life relaxing in the bathhouse, playing games, reading, writing, watching TV and movies, sleeping, eating, drinking and getting high, and punctuating the whole thing with the occasional orgasm.  That is really all I want from life.

And I feel like a worthless waste of a human being for feeling that way.  I hate myself for feeling that way.  But even so, I have no idea how to change it; I have no idea how to want anything else.

Okay, sure, I want other things.  Bigger things.  I want to have a big house with a yard and a basement and an attic.  I want to be able to support myself through writing, or some other form of creative expression.  (If only I could make a living playing games!)  I want a sense of accomplishment.  I want to feel like my life mattered, in any way.  I want to feel a sense of confidence that when I'm gone, I will have made some mark on the world that is all my own; that I will leave behind something more than a pile of carbon dust.  I do want all of these things.  But when I think about them, and I envision the monumental amount of work it would take to even try to achieve any of them - with no guarantee of success! - I lose any hope I may have had about ever actually achieving them.

Because I know that I will never do that work.  I just don't have it in me.  Achieving anything of any real significance requires a single-minded devotion that I just don't have.  Have never had.

Because deep-down, I don't want to be great.  All I really want is to be comfortable.  And I guess I am.  So I should be happy, then, right?  Then why do I feel this way?  I just wish I could learn to be happy with what I have, instead of hating myself for not being able to be great.

I guess what it all really comes down to is this:  I feel lazy, and I hate myself for being lazy, but I don't know how to make myself be anything else.  And I hate myself for that, too.

+          +          +

Or maybe I'm just depressed because winter is coming, and I'm all out of drugs, and I can feel both of these things gnawing at my bones.

Fifty-one Down...

Only one week left.  Just seven days (and three hours) from now, I will have completed one of the most significant accomplishments of my life so far.

I wish I knew how to feel about that.