ClumsyMonkey.net

by **joe_canadian** » 4/12/2004, 8:50 pm

An assignment in Writer's Craft instructed us to write our own memoirs up to this point in time, and I ran with it. Thought I might share. It's quite personal, be prepared.

I, Atlas

I will try to shy away from arrogant back-patting and exaggerated self-importance.
However, writing this requires that I be the exact opposite of shy. Try to take that in stride.
This is meant to give a voice to a boy who had none, and to explain how I became to be who I am today.

My earliest memories are not my own.
I may, at one point, have had proper recollections of what happened in the first years of my life, but not now. They have long since been written over by self-made fantasies and the stories of parents and videotape. Mostly videotape. My parents bought a camcorder solely to document their introduction to parenthood, and the awkward films that resulted are now permanently ingrained in my mind where first-hand experience should be. Third-person memories more important to others than to myself.
Most of these half-memories are standard baby-fare. I am playing with our cats. We had five at the time of my birth, and if the poor beasts were not skittish to begin with they were once I got at them, pulling and prodding like a good baby. I am eating, an activity only the horrible lack of grace a baby possesses can make entertaining. I am trying to walk, admirable for my smiling tenacity in the face of utter futility.
I do not remember these events, per se. All of these episodes of my life were related to me by the glowing screen of a television, with my parents providing warm commentary that always seemed just a tad more dramatic than was necessary.
What I do remember unassisted has more to do with how I was.
I was a coward, in the truest sense of the word. Anything slightly out of the ordinary sent me scurrying and sobbing with all the strength my small body could muster. I was once paralyzed in my bed at night because I was certain I saw a pair of demonic claws protruding from beneath my bed. I was certain. The next day, I realized they were my beloved slippers, shaped as they were as friendly, cow-eyed dinosaurs.
I was stubborn, hellishly so. I loathed change and fought it passionately. Anything that seemed different, any change in routine was an inexcusable offence to my sensibilities. If my family were to travel somewhere, there was one route to get there, and only one. I operated on a schedule that was not to be interfered with, even when I was too young to read a clock. My room was never neat but God help me I knew where everything was.
Most significantly, I was sensitive, to the point where any pain, any slight suffered by anyone around me would be felt almost as intensely by little me. I wept for villains violently dispatched in movies. I was appalled by the perceived callousness of people who were not taken back by the seemingly endless reports of death in newspapers. I incessantly asked my mother why people had to die, and was never satisfied by any answer. When my mother and father would fight, I would be wounded to my trembling core. I later learned the word empathy, and at first thought it a nice encapsulation of my peculiarity. Later still, I found the word to be too light in connotation.
What I know best about myself in these years is a trait I’m not sure has a name. I find it where my other, more tangible quirks overlap. I think the best word to describe it is vigilance. I did not let go. I did not forget. I never released the weight of things most people held important for only a passing moment. I liked to think that I carried that which no one else wanted to, so that they might be happy.
The camcorder has not been used for years. Only the words used to describe me have changed.

I divide my childhood into two halves. The first was spent in London, Ontario, the second began when my family moved to Peterborough. I put up the fuss over moving that I imagine all children faced with the prospect do, but not for the same reasons as they. I had no real friends to leave, nor many particularly happy memories. I had a home though, my home. The home, and I would not live in a new one. The concept was absurd. I was, of course, smiled at and laughed off as being, once again, the cutely stubborn boy. I possessed a certain satisfaction in knowing that I raised such hell in the process of the move that I was eventually taken seriously. Taken seriously, berated, but still not listened to. I was, after all, only a child. I wish I had realized my place then, and saved myself from much pain. We moved in August of 1995.
What really tore at me so deeply in those days was my sudden awareness of my family. My mother and father divorced when I was only two, and my mother remarried several years later.
Videos show me how my mother and father once loved each other, but I have not one true memory of it.
This fragmentation was never important, nor even readily apparent, until we moved. My parents had a fairly friendly relationship, we were happy with one another, we coexisted. That changed quite severely.
The move would bring us a better life, better paying jobs for my mother and step-father, and a better community to raise myself and my sisters. We would, however, not be seeing my father nearly as much as we once did. My father did not accept this. He fought tooth and nail to keep us in London, but could not develop the legal leverage to do so. I will not speak much of my father in that time, but I do know that I take more than a little of my personality from him, and if ever in my life I took a burden upon myself that was beyond my ability to bear, it was with him. At the time, I resented my step-father, and in a smaller way my mother, but I know now there was no reason to. I saw my father as being alone, and it seemed to me that he was hurt where no one else was. I gravitated towards him, because my sensibilities told me he needed someone on his side. I thought I could mend things between my parents, I thought I could make everyone happy just by willing it to be so. I took their pain upon myself and tried to fix what was broken. I failed.
The move’s emotional violence and resulting icy fallout, the imagined spectacular failure of my idealism thoroughly destroyed whatever social skill my young self might have had.

For years of my childhood’s second half, I barely spoke. When I did, it was most often an angry outburst, followed by tears. I had long since passed the point where anger was admissible, and tears bought me ridicule and shame. I had also committed the unforgivable sin of being fat and awkward, and I was remorselessly branded an outcast. I spent these years enamoured in a cyclic routine of pain. I awoke every school day in fear, caught a bus in which I sat alone, and spent a seven hour blur being alternately shouted at for my bad behaviour and teased with astonishing ferocity, magnified hundred-fold by my hyper-sensitivity. I rode the bus home, again off to myself, except in instances where kids were not satisfied that I had suffered enough for my oddness. I arrived home and spent the rest of the night by myself, usually in the reassuring arms of television, books, or games. My parents assumed my intense aversion to school was the same as any boy’s, they assumed I wanted to avoid work. It was not so.
I do not seek pity for these times.
Regardless of the circumstances, I spent most of my time in this routine watching. I watched television and movies, just as all kids my age did, but it did not end there. I was always on the periphery of my peers’ lives, observing. I’m sure I was found to be disturbing, being a loner as I was. I tried to make sense of things, I wanted to understand why I was hated and what made me different. I wanted to be adored by those who apparently hated me. I watched how they acted, how they played and treated each other. I was blessed with an incredibly accurate memory, and pored over all that I knew day and night, staring at the walls of my room well into the early hours of the morning. I tried to replicate the behaviour of others, but could not. Frustrated, I would lash out at those I longed to take me in. It was not in me to be as caustic and carefree as was popular.
I can still recall parts of my room’s walls in exquisite detail.
I would like to say that the cycle ended happily. I have told others, as I have told myself, that I found people who accepted me for me. I would like to be able to say that my principles prevailed, and I suffered no more. I will not lie. I sold my self out for a world less painful.
My old self suffocated, surely and slowly, in the latter years of grade school. His kicking and screaming and crying would not save him. Though parts of him remained with me, though I could not make shallow the great wells of passion inside of me, he was safely hidden from prying eyes.
There is no specific date, no event that marked the end of one self and the buying into of a new one, but the little boy who cared too much was securely buried inside of me shortly before I entered high school.
As I came to be more sociable I was seen less and less. I found that I could have friends if I sealed away all that was genuine and unique inside of me. I could even get girls. I was amazed at the success I could reap by just acting a little less like me. And then a little less. And less still. It still hurt at night, when I was without my faux-friends and met my own ghost in the dark, but I retained my stubbornness.
“Why do this? Why pretend? Why can’t you be happy otherwise?” I always thought in the third person.
I scoffed at my own questions. I bit my lip when it trembled and raged at hot tears.
I was doing well. My parents were proud of my progress. My sisters were not ashamed to be associated with me in public. I was not an embarrassment to myself. I was still tainted with oddness, I was always sure and made sure of my own inferiority, but I had made it to the promised land of success. High school arrived and I did even better. I thought I had hit on the winning formula for life.
Then I experienced heartbreak.
The girl involved is not important, but I have since thanked her for the part she played in changing me. If I was ill-prepared to enter social life, I was far less ready to deal with this new shock. I realized that even as a doppelganger of perceived perfection I could fail. My obscene sensitivity returned. The tenuous world I had built for myself collapsed, and my fatalistic self was sure this was the end. I resumed not talking. I once again sequestered myself on the periphery of social thought. I tore at my own flesh. Every day my being reverberated around a unified incoherent pain drawn from within and without. Everything hurt me.
I spent seven months this way. Giving it that number, acknowledging that the lowest point of my life had a definite beginning and end, it seems like a pitifully small amount of time. It was not. It was seven months: every day, every hour, every minute. If anything makes me unique, it is my immense capacity for feeling.
I remember these days well because they were not long ago. I remember well how they ended, for though I have not lived a long life, I have lived long enough for the past to catch up with me.
He stood quietly at the edge of my mind. He watched as I fell from my mock grace. He slipped out of his grave just to sympathize with me. He took my burden on his shoulders, though he had not the strength to do so. He felt my pain as vividly as I did, and he wanted it to end as much as I did, but he did not relinquish its weight regardless.
I stopped denying myself.
Looking at my life as a history, I see two people. Then and Now. Now is happy, Now is well-adjusted and working hard at making a life for himself. Now did find people who loved him for him, who were there longer than he realized. He loves them, and gives to them all of himself without reservation. But Now weeps for Then, placing longing fingers on the televised images of Then he cannot himself remember. Though the two found peace in consolidation, found strength in each other’s trials and traits, Then can never be consoled. Then is a sad little boy with tears in his eyes, trying in vain to make everything better in the world solely through the strength of a will I have never since seen or possessed. I want to tell him what I know now, that things really are okay, that things really do get better, that he doesn’t have to try quite to hard, but I can’t. I have to be content with the long trial by fire that severed him from existence and hardened me into what I am today. I am sorry for him. I want someone to make things better for him, to take his burden as he did for so many.
I take small comfort in the fact that if I were able to go back and tell him these things, I know what he would do.
He would smile and not listen.

Never call me naïve.
I will never stop trying, I will never stop caring, because that is who I am.