Since for most of my adult life I have not had the time or quite enough excess money to undergo a course of really good psychiatric treatment, I have had to try to figure out on my own some possible causes for why my mind and will turned out the way they did, which has been a source of considerable dissatisfaction for me over the years. Some time ago now, before it became a well known and widely diagnosed condition, I read about Asperger's Syndrome in a fairly highbrow publication, where it was presented as an eccentric and even interesting condition associated with stronger than ordinary intellects, and I thought that some of the characteristics of it were not unlike things I had observed in myself. I made the mistake of mentioning this to my wife at the time. In those days of the late 90s and early 2000s when it was more associated with people who were difficult and odd but generally quite brilliant she was hesitant to attribute the condition to me, but once it entered the mainstream and began to be treated more as something of a handicap and socially undesirable (a diagnosis qualifies you for special education in school) she seemed to become much more open to, even convinced of the possibility that I indeed had this, with connotations that seemed to me more negative than positive, as if to infer that had I been properly identified and labeled as being this sort of person earlier in life, for which such a clear definition did not exist at the time, she would had better insight as to my likely future and perhaps have been able to avoid getting so involved with me. And this for something that I have never been clinically diagnosed as having but mentioned in passing once 20 years ago.
I came across the "Lost Child" (also known sometimes as "The Invisible Boy") while reading a history about Ronald Reagan's rise to prominence. Reagan apparently struggled with Invisible Boy type behavior in the early part of his childhood but somehow managed to overcome it between the ages of 10 and 14 or so, to which some psychologists attribute the subsequent lifelong artificial-seeming nature of his personality and worldview. One website I found ("Dysfunctional Family Roles") describes this condition thus:
"The Lost Child is usually known as "the quiet one" or "the dreamer". The Lost Child is the invisible child. They try to escape the family situation by making themselves very small and quiet. (S)He stays out of the way of problems and spends a lot of time alone...Because the Lost Child is rarely in trouble, the family can say, "He's a good kid. Everything seems fine in his life, so things can't be too bad in the family." This child avoids interactions with other family members and basically disappears. They become loners, or very shy. The Lost Child seeks the privacy of his or her own company to be away from the family chaos. Because they don't interact, they never have a chance to develop important social and communication skills. The Lost Child often has poor communication skills, difficulties with intimacy and in forming relationships. They deny that they have any feelings and "don't bother getting upset." They deal with reality by withdrawing from it."
This admittedly sounds a lot like me. Some things about my behavior that I think are related to this include:
1. While it may not seen that way from my persona on the blog, in real life I almost always accept the position that other people's goals and desires and successes are more important than mine, and I am very conscientious about never being actively obstructive to them. I used to have something of an idea that if I possessed the value I believed myself to possess, that I would in time be able to achieve some things that I wanted anyway without ever having to inconvenience anyone else (in effect I would be rewarded for not being obnoxiously pushy), but it is pretty obvious now that the world does not work that way.
2. Despite having some self-esteem, which is necessary to being able to function and go out in public at all, I have always tended to avoid interacting much with other people, usually because it seemed impossible that I would have anything to say to them that would be interesting to them, and especially when the case was vice-versa. There are in truth very few people I know at any given time that I have any interest in talking to anyway, but at this point in my life I cannot really do it because I am so long out of practice unless the other person is able to engage me nearly on my approximate level a good portion of the time, which seems to be rare.
3. It is true that most of my mental engagement with life, and even with language itself, in my youth was through older books and to a lesser extent older movies, and as such I have never had any success socially with people whose minds are informed entirely by the contemporary environment. This is why I will always maintain that St John's was on the whole good for me, because everyone there has some degree of this kind of consciousness of the past. Since leaving school I have met very few people possessing any amount of normal attractiveness with whom I have been able to establish any rapport. Of this small number most either seemed to come from large religious families or have gone to the same kind of small, unorthodox or anachronistic schools that I went to.
4. One of my hopes in having so many children and why I was for the most part on board with doing that was my consciousness throughout my life of always being alone, not having anyone with any force helping me or ever being on my side, and I thought that having a lot of siblings might help to mitigate those kinds of problems. I am not sure that it is quite working out that way with my older children, though to me their high school years do not appear to be as full of the Sturm und Drang that I remember having gone through myself, though it is possible I am not attentive to it. I also don't know how much help in navigating this 21st century I and the rest of the family will be for anyone either, though given the effort put into it I have to believe it will be something.
There was another point I wanted to hit on but I lost it, cannot remember what it was now.
I heard this song from my later youth on the radio the other day for the first time in some years, and remembered that I liked it. I couldn't find a vintage MTV video of it, but I think this one of what looks like someone's girlfriend wandering around is actually better (though apparently the city is San Francisco, not New York, though I would not know whether it really was San Francisco).
I remember how all the cool people, even if they were otherwise dedicated U2 fans, trashed this song when it came out. I don't really get what's wrong with it, it's catchy, and the lyrics in the beginning of the song about arriving in New York in December in the rain and hearing a song on the local radio evokes a real feeling of the excitement and thrill of such an arrival, I have had similar feelings, or close to them, upon arriving there by train at that time of year, when I was younger. The critics seemed to think that the attempt to pay homage to Billie Holliday was, at best, cheesy, but on the whole pretentious or ridiculous. I don't know. I like listening to Billie Holliday in the right atmosphere or in the right company, though she was never a great favorite of mine. I think the U2 song works, at this remove in time I like the enthusiasm and the joie de vivre even if all of the lines don't strike a perfect note.
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