Why Write?
Part 3: Because You Naturally Gravitate Towards Solo Activities When Your Childhood Was Awful
Writing makes me feel deeply rooted in consciousness. Furthermore, it’s a craft that behooves you to be solitary if you desire to practice it optimally—despite what you may have seen at Starbucks. I've always felt more drawn to the Void than any of my other more socially participatory options. This is neither here nor there, but it would probably be something like a punk show, comedy club, or house party if I had to pick one. If it happens spontaneously that’s fine for the most part, I've just never liked any kind of gathering enough to actively try to go to one. To a certain degree, everyone feels that way once they're older, but I was absent from every gathering as a 15-year-old proto-sadboy and supposedly Satanic pariah. Imagine being a homebody mall goth. What a hilariously incongruent string of qualifers. I'm 37 now so though the clothes have changed that lone wolf personality trait is pretty locked in. Plus, you throw the tiredness of being in physical decline together with enough life experience to know that the company of your average assortment of selfie-snapping solipsistic individualists that are millennial age or younger are rarely worth the effort to show up to the invite much less worth enough trust to warrant any genuine expression of my difficulty with a set of properly complex emotional problems. Throw all that together with some omnipresent post-traumatic stress and you’ve got a recipe for a motherfucker that would rather put up the shutters when it comes to the business of being social.
Even though I always had trouble fitting in, constantly being on guard and prone to isolation probably starts with my father and how unsafe he made me feel at home growing up. His father was a physically abusive alcoholic, and he never dealt with any of that or even talked about it much. I caught a few glimpses of how bad it truly was from conversations I had with my aunt. I heard childhood stories of her being beaten black and blue with the water hose in the front yard for showing up 15 minutes late from borrowing the car. A grown man beating the shit out of a teenage girl for all the world to watch is such a disgraceful display of alcoholic narcissism that I’ve never had an ounce of respect for where I genetically come from. That was just one story of a handful I was told that I know came from a large menagerie of painful snapshots of the barbaric mental states alcoholism had drawn out of this psychotic dunce. You have to be a pretty intolerable lummox to warrant a divorce in the 1950s—smack dab in the middle of God’s Country, mind you—when to get one meant your former spouse and your children were guaranteed to be at least partially shunned. Suffice it to say that even though I ended up neglected and emotionally underdeveloped due to my father’s workaholism it was better than the alternative option. I preferred him being gone to when he was actually home and taking out all his unprocessed trauma on us. As a neurodivergent child, I was quite impulsive and rambunctious; I often found myself in various forms of trouble. I was also the eldest child and was raised as a son. This set me up to take the brunt of his abusive behavior just behind his employees at work, and my mother.
It can be a godsend for some, but an early ADHD diagnosis didn't help my situation much. Picture a little 4-year-old pre-kindergarten Prizzy chewing up Ritalin at the water fountain in the cafeteria at lunch. Being violated from inside my own brain was the norm, so my guard being up is formative like my southern accent and all the little vocal mannerisms that make it up. Thank Jesus, Marie, and Joseph I have a certain measure of southern charm to go along with that drawl because socially coasting on bringing a sense of nonjudgmental calm is the only way I can get along with anyone, for the most part. It's just a display of neurodivergent masking at its finest any time I’m around people I don’t know in public. It’s a challenge that I internally rise to with as much flair as I can manage because my ADHD brain is deficient in dopamine which drives it to seek out novelty. The differentiation between myself and the gregarious one is they are energized by a lot of company whereas for me it feels like a skill I’ve picked up subconsciously. My proficiency in the entertainment of strangers doesn't negate the fact that it still requires a lot of my energy for output. It’s not something that charges my battery, and I can only deal with continuous proximity with other people for so long before it really starts to bother me. I guess the unvarnished truth of it is that I know I can somewhat pass for neurotypical if I’m flashy enough and not around for too long.
Not being around for too long never seemed all that hard to accomplish, honestly. Even when I was a very young adult—like 18, 19—I was never out in a crowd of people with no ulterior motive; there was either a girl or drugs or an artist I liked having a concert or something. I was braving the waters for a reward of some kind. I’ve had infinitely more moments where I felt insecure and awkward than ones where I basked in my sociality. The fact is, not only am I neurodivergent but I'd learned to be unkind to myself pretty early in my childhood. That's not really the combo you want if you want your kid to just figure out on their own how to “play well with others.” It should come as no shock that my experience with other children was fraught with hurt feelings and disappointment. My “best friend” and I got into an annual fistfight from kindergarten to high school about every 12 months or so. He also periodically abandoned me to hang out with a couple of guys who thought I sucked, and whenever he was with them he acted like he didn’t know who I was. He was a borderline sociopath, but I didn’t have a lot of other options because being one of the cool kids unfortunately wasn't my luck.
I'd tried to fit in all through elementary school with no success, and by 12 years old I started to rebel culturally with music and clothing choices. By the time I was 14—with a small clique of mostly older mall goths to impress—I said, “fuck it” and turned to substances. I found instant relief from my sorrow in getting fucked up and—without the knowledge of any other method to effectively cope—by the time I was 23 years old I'd become an IV heroin junkie. I was already regularly popping pills, doing coke, and snorting dope when I was a couple of years younger. It’d be easy to write off the intravenous drug problems in my early twenties as a predictable progression for an addict that started using when they were 14, but there was another unspoken hunger inside of me I was cognizant of well before I ever took a drug. It was just as much a call to adventure that might involve going exploring on foot, climbing tall trees, and setting things on fire as much as it was a call for lethargy that could be manifested by JRPGs, television, and eating food for comfort. It didn’t take too many years of drug addiction to see my true motives for self-destruction. I knew at 20 years old I wasn't just constantly doing hard drugs for fun. Paradoxically, the self-harm aspect of killing myself with a drug habit was secondary; primarily I wanted to find the chemical that would efficiently silence the incessant whining of my injured inner child by numbing my mental and emotional suffering. Then I wanted to use that chemical to get by mentally and emotionally while it slowly ate me alive until I died young. I’d almost gotten there with some other drugs, so I knew there had to be one. It ended up being heroin, as I believe we’ve discussed. We've also covered how I’d been taught from an early age I would always be the outsider, so according to the twisted logic that assumption allotted to me there were people who had those boilerplate relationships and emotions that added up to a normal life, but I didn’t make the cut. Too impulsive, too combative. Too disruptive in class.
That’s partially accurate, but it left out the part about normal being a profit-driven abstract concept that’s fake and rather unimaginative. It forgot to include the part about a normal life being something I would feel positively trapped in if I had it. When you live in a kingdom of lies, getting to the heart of the matter of your life is a process of picking out little lies left in your psyche like shrapnel. It’s always so cringeworthy to look back at even five years ago and recall all the wrong information you were operating from. Imagine living a life where you weren’t still pulling the wool from your eyes four decades after your arrival on the planet. Must be nice. The sour mash of childhood pain and bitter nihilism that had been rotting inside me like a barrel of aged Kentucky whiskey while outwardly masquerading as reckless abandon was what primarily created the mindset that rendered me ready and willing to dive arm-first to injecting myself with something like a powder that came out of a pouch of aluminum foil I just copped from some guy in the parking lot of a CVS pharmacy. The non-feeling of that kind of abject apathy towards deadly self-harm is something that's hard to articulate, but once I got a taste of just being gone I immediately began to crave that total oblivion. That's about as attractive as any state of consciousness can get for someone that means to bulldoze their ability to be aware of any and all of their emotional suffering. I had a consistent existential sense of profound disappointment that a party just couldn't take the edge off of, my bro. Not even close. I'd have rather been at home alone doing drugs while reading Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly than peacocking in front of a bunch of random hipsters at a house party. Why exert so much effort to impress a bunch of insufferably smug kids that are just standing around judging me and everyone else harshly? Prove I belong in their subculture for what? I was a pariah in my hometown growing up for being goth in the religious south and—as ridiculous as it sounds—every adult in charge at the time took it so seriously that it more or less ruined my teenage life until I got the fuck out. I got rumors I sacrificed a girl's cat to Satan for my sweet sixteen if that gives you any idea of how things were going down. I wouldn't say I have trust issues because you would have to have a prerequisite measure of trust to then go on to have issues with, and I don't even have that baseline amount.
I never even really learned to socialize until around the age of 20 when I moved to Austin. I'll admit that it was somewhat liberating to finally be in a city that prided itself on being odd. The problem was that the pride part made all of the cultural and intellectual conversations I'd fantasized about having as a country bumpkin an irritating pissing contest. I'd discovered that talking about music, philosophy, or art with someone you don't know was only worth it as a somewhat intimate post-coital convo. Otherwise, that kind of talk was mostly reserved for obnoxious pseudo-intellectuals so I avoided it. It made sense to me since I had no interest in putting myself through that kind of pointless endurance test for my patience which was already paltry. Since my drug problem started when I was 14, it was as easy to run back to in moments of vulnerability as an ex-lover’s arms. It wasn't long after being exposed to all of this laborious posturing that I'd have rather been shooting up black tar than going to a party. Especially when—excuse me while I vomit, because this is so trite but it's true—in the twenty-first century human relationships have become just another commodity. From what I've seen, it's simply a series of games where various feelings are at stake by turns tender and awful. Opting out with drugs was my answer for the longest because while they were a guaranteed downward spiral at least they weren't dishonest.
Right now, millions of twenty-somethings are playing house with near strangers because fake is almost always the only option if you want to have any interaction at all. It's only gotten worse the more that we've refined our technology. People are picking up that everything is a performance but not pondering the depth to which this observation has a reach. I mean there's always the nuclear family option, but to live that lifestyle now you apparently have to also be a Nazi. Suffice it to say, when it comes to dealing with other bizarre and often harmful primates, I tend towards saying to hell with all of it. That primarily leaves me with dregs of fair-weather internet flockers who would turn on me instantly if they bought the right story from the right mouth, Tinder matches that never seem to lead up to me actually leaving the house, and friends I once knew well but barely hear from to now. There is an empty quality to the modern age of "long friendships" that often consist of one of you coming around everyone 6 to 12 months to initiate a five-minute cliff notes trade of your lived experience since you last talked. It leaves something to be desired, although I’m not sure what. People say they live in the modern age as if it's desirable to live in an era where anything that ever happens is for the sake of capital and every major city exists behind a fucking Paywall. There's no town square, there's no City Hall, just a wasteland where the ancient concept of the human community once was. If you ever have to go to a government building, it's either some regulatory hassle or you're in fucking trouble. Rich networks of people who know and trust each other are now just a collection of fully eroded husks eaten up by convenience culture, suburban sprawl, and frequent episodes of depression and loneliness.
Part of me feels like it's upon all of us doomed American writers who are without either enough money and/or balls to expatriate to at least leave a record of how ridiculous all this bullshit was before we blew it all to kingdom come. No, that’s dishonest. That’s not it at all. Even though that's a good argument, I’m too aware that I'm ultimately just covering up for the compulsion to shrug it off. Being a writer is like having a lifelong virus. The symptom is your operating system is always constructing hyper-symbolic ideas and compulsively filing away all that detritus. Or maybe it's like an unwelcome guest inside of your head that's always disrupting the quietness. It’s like you've got this chatty Kathy inside your skull who thinks she’s so smart and keeps jabbering on and on until it fucks up another perfect silence.
And then you turn right the fuck around and write down all that nonsense.
Bravo & thank you.
Thats what i call a mind being put to fine use.
Thank you for cohesively spewing forth.
The world is richer for your story.
I’m having trouble sleeping again tonight but I can see the forest for the trees better now for having decided to read no 3. Rarely have I read things that leave me asking questions, kindly, instead of anxiously. Do you think lotuses encourage one other to grow?