The "Who Am I?" Question

that’s… all. What will I make of myself? Now, that’s a question. Who shall I be next, what qualities do I want to see in myself, how can I build? These, I understand.
I don’t know whether the difference lies in myself or in my upbringing or both or neither. Nature/nurture, the eternal question. I mean, I’ve always been “weird”. I don’t mean the things I enjoy publicly and talk about, the ways I move and the expressions on my face, what I wear and read and do – these I can control, and in them, yes, I am unashamedly weird. But that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s something more subtle than that. It’s an unsettling effect and throughout my life I’ve tried to understand it but it always eludes me. Its manifestation, in the end, always comes down to “people don’t like me”.
     In truth, most regular people really do like me; I listen to what they have to say, I always want to help out, I can be pretty funny sometimes, I know how to participate in stuff I don’t care much for so we can hang out, whatevs, man. I’m generally seen as affable, a nice person. Good for a nice chat, discussion, a bit of advice, what have you. And I’m talented, and love making gifts for my friends. But after a while… there’s just something about me. People just… start getting kind of creeped out by me or something. I don’t know. I don’t understand it. Neither do they. The kind ones simply tell me that they find me strange, when they notice, and we laugh about it. These are the ones who stick around long enough to get over it and are now my closest friends. People who never seem to find me too weird to just get on with in the first place, who never notice or question or ask about it but just say fuck it, she’s cool enough – these are my BEST friends, recognizably in my karass.
     This effect even persists in every kind of forum, written or spoken, guided group or social gathering, with any age group in any setting, including online groups, even nerd-cons, even when I’m trying to toe the line and say very little and blend in like some kind of normal person. It always used to bother me, from when I was a small child and became able to recognize that it was happening. Quickly I wasn’t part of the group, any group. I would be praised for things, and asked for advice for things and about things, and grownups loved me. But even though people would talk positively ABOUT me, I never really had any… friends, for the most part. Usually only one at a time, which worried the family member raising me enough to seek advice (to no helpful end), and I would cling to these friends with what I now recognize as a form of desperation. As well, I have always been one of those people the bullies go after instinctively, and it wasn’t until my very late teens that I experienced any form of life without constant bullying of one kind or another. I had only these few friends, and the family members who saved me later, with me against… all the rest of it all. We’ll get into all that some other time. The point is I was weird.
     A few years ago I decided that “myself” was getting kind of atrophied and that I was getting to be too old for that shit. My job was secure (so it seemed at the time, mwah ha ha, but that, too, is for some other post). I had some free time and because my creativity had not yet recovered from the death of someone very important to me a couple of years before, I was bored. I also had been given, for the first time in my life, access to online gaming. In my previous life* I had never had access to higher end video games, only the arcades and this one “friend” (I was dumped there with a classmate who could stand me as a free babysitting option) with an early Nintendo console. Never had more than that until my 40’s, when we got an Xbox 360 for our kid. So in effect, I went straight from wireframe arcade Star Wars to Bioshock, and I loved every freaking second of it. Then came the game I truly loved, with the sadly crappy sequel – and I found myself in a new world, and I thought to myself, you know what? Be yourself. Let people at work know you’re a nerd. And for the love of all that is or is not holy, talk to these people like you have some kind self-confidence. Be your real self. Think back to that kid you were who just said what she thought and liked what she liked. You’re among nerdy gamers from the whole world here, ferchrissakes. Let your self out: there’s bound to be room to be you here!

and laughed when I made jokes and treated me like a goddamn human being, and I made a really good friend. I mean, a real friend. It was great and then… it wasn’t. We went on campaigns together, we goofed off and we traded stories and we had a grand time and I finally felt like I’d found some kind of community to be a small part of and then… fewer people asked me to join. My jokes weren’t funny anymore. Increasingly, when I came online, people I played with regularly would coincidentally immediately drop out of “our” game and go start playing something I don’t. Eventually, an event we’d planned for months for my birthday rolled up while I was still clinging to the idea (like I was starting to cling too hard to that new, good friend as I felt them all going from me) that everyone was just busy lately. Now it was my birthday and we’d been planning for months to take me into an activity I’d wished I could do but which requires several people, and ones not selected at random by the computer.
     That morning I had checked in and everyone was all set for later – they knew I was going to stay up all night, that’s how special it was to play with them in their time zones. I had carefully chosen snacks and drinks set up for myself so as to keep up a good state of mental sharpness and not let the team down, and shared the pictures. Then that one guy, my bro, had a health crisis (he’s fine!) and… everyone else ghosted. I watched in amazement as they all came online, an hour to three after the start time, and just.. went and played other stuff. And not one of them ever “spoke” to me again except one guy, who had treated me like a friend up until that moment, who said, “When I saw the other guy was sick I just didn’t really feel like bothering anymore. I like him.” And it was the same as it ever was. And my bud, my pal? Ghosted me too over the next couple of months, steadily harder, until I was outright taunting him to admit that that’s what was happening because damn it, I was fed up. Then I gave up on him too. I still send him holiday cards though. It probably weirds him out. But I miss my bro.**
     That was a blow that I took all too brutally (my disillusionment and despair was ridiculous, really, I see that now). Both the experience and my reaction to it were later transformational, though, when my year of illness gave me some accidental time to think (once I could again). I’m not that person anymore; I didn’t like that person, so I made me a new one.

     I have always known who I am, and I have always been me. Sometimes one must rebuild the external features, the way of acting in the world, the structure of the assumptions and reactions framework, is all. In retrospect, this marked the beginning of the time period that would lead me to eventually realize (in large part the hard way) how very far above my own limits I’d been operating for how long, and I saw how strung out I was getting – how attenuated – and how dangerous a state that is. I like to think I’m doing a little better now.
     In middle school I remember vividly the semester when I thought I could start over, with a new school and new teachers. I tried as hard as I could to act just like the other girls. I lay awake nights obsessing over how I could appear more normal. I laughed at the things they found funny. I did my hair like theirs. I never, ever, EVER talked about the things I had learned by then were off the socially-unremarkable list: taxidermy, science fiction, antique medical equipment, zoology, astronomy, death, reptiles, growth, books, bugs. Birds. Folklore. What if? Anthropology. Dragons. How things work. Horses. (OK, if I acted girly enough I could talk about horses.) And at the end of that semester, the teacher I had liked best and felt I was most getting along with, the one adult I had pegged as in my court, told the parent who raised me – or at least so said this parent – that he had never in his entire career seen a child try harder to stand out, never seen a kid try harder to “be different” and “act weird”, than I had. 

questioned “who I am” but only “how I’m behaving”?
     Might be. It might just be my nature. But there’s the other option too: nurture. Environment. Since my earliest memories my mindset has been one of survival and only now, in late middle age, is it being brought to my attention that this isn’t particularly normal.
     My earlier upbringing was at the hands of someone truly lost, someone who (unbeknownst to me at the time, being as I was a baby and toddler and all that) was going through some pretty heavy shit, shit which also culminated a massive storm of horror in this person’s life that remained unknown to me until I was in my late 30’s. I was raised, in short, by someone who was not only profoundly damaged but was also not actually managing to keep it particularly together.
Until my early teens I thought it was me. I honestly believed that the variable reality with which I was being presented was the real way to look at the world, and that I was failing to grasp it all because I was (as I was told repeatedly, daily, in no uncertain terms) hopelessly stupid, utterly self-centered, and probably insane: to be told over and over and over again that one is trying very hard to be strange, when one honestly believes oneself to be doing the opposite, is not easy to deal with when you’re 3 or 7 or even 12. To be told every ten minutes about how obvious it is that one cares only for oneself, that one is so selfish she thinks everyone her servants and herself “Queen of the World” (leveled at me repeatedly, but the most memorable being the time I left an ankle-sock lying on my own floor after taking the laundry through to the washroom), is devastating to a child who really is just trying to help, or hide.
     Thus home wasn’t a refuge, it was a trap – but I needed a refuge. I was always bullied. Black eyes, skinned knees and palms, once a bruise that covered my entire thigh after I was rammed with a bicycle when I was 9. Chased with nail guns, my hair ripped out, thrown from that railroad trestle the vampires hang from in The Lost Boys (thank chance that happened in winter when the river below was in flood, so that I was swept into the ocean instead of breaking my legs on the bottom, or worse). And at home the only response would be, “What did you do? If you didn’t go so far out of your way all the time to act so damned weird, if you weren’t so stupid and selfish, maybe you wouldn’t antagonize them anymore.”

     But that’s all the old days. I didn’t mean to focus on that, I’m just trying to make the point that my initial mindset had to be survival and, to be honest, I’m sure that’s why I’m still here, because since then there has been no single moment, no period of my life, which I would have “survived” otherwise. People hear all the stories (most of which will surely be aired here at some point) and say things to me like, “You’re so strong!” or “I don’t know how you keep going”, or “most people couldn’t carry on like you”. The problem, for me, with these sentiments is that I am literally unable to comprehend an alternative.
     It’s like that time in my early 40’s when I had bronchitis and a high fever, and I was cycling with a cargo bike uphill into a blizzard, and my legs just couldn’t move anymore. I was so tired. I was so sick. I could barely stand. What was I supposed to do, though? If I stopped, what would that have done? It would have trapped me in the middle of a snowstorm halfway up a hill with two toddlers, one of them not even mine. It would, in short, have been WORSE. So I kept going.
Likewise all the stuff people say like, “How do you go on?” about the antics of the most recent decade, and the uncalled-for and stupid misfortunes that have culminated this end of it. I don’t understand these questions because there simply is no alternative. One does not exist. I can’t kill myself, that’s an irrevocable act which completely destroys all other possibilities and eliminates hope – and anyway I would never put my family through something like that. What a cruel thing to do.
I can’t just… give up… because I don’t understand what that means. Become catatonic and stop eating, drinking, conversing, moving? If it ever happens to me it won’t be by choice. It won’t be because I stopped taking the next step or looking for the next solution. Crawl into my bed and never come out? Even during the worst of this year of illness I couldn’t comprehend abandoning my family like that. I’m lucky enough to have people now who would take care of me, and that is the greatest social achievement of my life, but it doesn’t work that way (and anyway I’d get bored and start feeling useless). I can’t stop trying. I think that would be the same as death. I’ve been so low in the last year I know what rock bottom tastes like but I can damned well keep standing on it and looking for opportunities to climb back up.