I was born
I got bored, and remained bored for like 10 years. It loving sucked and I still hate my mom and my sister a bit for making my life that terrible. But I don't really tell them that.
My first memories are all faded out now, but there are two of them. The first was leaving our apartment. The morning edition was playing on NHPR. The second was a dream I had about being eaten by an alligator. I only figured out that it was second because it was set next to the pond on our next house's property. It was vivid and terrifying.
The rest of the early memory is just deep dissatisfaction and boredom. I was a very angry, change-resistant kid. I wanted more than anything to stay at home and be left to my own devices all day. Instead I got dragged along behind my sister as she signed up for more and more loving activities. She wanted to do everything that she ever saw somebody do. She played like every sport known to man, and I got to drive there with her and watch. The worst of it was the bagpipes. Even after all this was done every day, though, I couldn't just play games. I couldn't look at a screen for more than a half hour a day. Any screen counted unless we were watching a documentary about beavers or space or whatever.
I had to cope with it somehow, so I'd often build spheres out of lego. They got up to about the size of a bowling ball and they were as perfectly round as you can get with bricks. They would roll pretty well. Whenever I got really mad, I'd barricade myself into my room with a pathetic pile of furniture and other crap I kept around and then I would smash my lego spheres until I felt like I'd released it. I don't have any anymore because I stopped building them when I stopped feeling the need to have things to smash. Even when I was this young I hated when my mother tried to comfort me. It was pointless because she had no idea how much it hurt me to be dragged around like I was. Even if she pretended to, it was pointless because she never did anything about it. She had this need to feel like she was doing the right thing. She still does. It's insane sometimes. One time when I went on vacation with my father and my sister, my mom decided that my room needed to be cleaner. While doing this, she also decided that she should reorganize my lego collection by size and shape instead of color. Without telling me. I came back and saw what she'd done, and while I was devastated about it and crying she demanded that I recognize that she was trying to do me a favor and I should be thankful. I held a grudge about that for a long time. I still kinda do. I still kinda love her though. Even if she destroyed me emotionally forever.
When I stopped being angry, it was because I had learned to control emotion so that I wouldn't have to deal with her trying to comfort me or help me.
After that I turned into something of a young role model. There were a bunch of places where I met a younger kid and I'd just treat them as an equal and help them with whatever and be a friend if they didn't really have any there. Little kids liked me a lot. I fell out of touch with all of them, but when they wanted me there, I was patient. If patience is a virtue, I'm a saint.
I overcame a bizarrely deep-seated fear and loathing of femininity in all forms, and replaced it with a deep-seated fear of loving everything else.
I figured out that I have some major memory issues. I haven't really pinned them down and I don't care to, but it was very obvious from tests I took while I was homeschooled. 99th percentile in everything but short-term memory tests, where I ranked almost in the lower half.
I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I'd read and read and read until my eyes stopped working. When that didn't work, I'd attempt to smooth the transition into dreams by creating elaborate stories. I only had two or three storylines, each failing due to forgetfulness after they became way way way too elaborate and I got stuck plot-wise. One of my characters was a six-legged otter with opposable thumbs because that seemed pretty cool at the time. About two years later I read a book with a six-legged otter in it. The concept solidified and it's one of my little links to my younger years.
My parents got divorced, but like really chill after they stopped yelling. My sister and I knew it was going to happen. There was no real shock. The surprise was that they had only held the marriage together because they wanted to have a good environment for us to grow up in. It was four or five years in the making. It's kinda heartbreaking now that I think about it. My dad found somebody pretty quickly after the breakup and they've been together since. My mom can't find a guy. She has acquired a terrifying stalker in the process. She's tried like all the online dating sites. I'm afraid and I'm certain that she's afraid that she won't find somebody. She's very specific about a lot of things that she wants, and if she really likes a guy she can make it work for a while, but I've seen that it isn't good for her.
I developed a social life based off of self-deprecating humor and being generally nice, built as an accessory over my social anxiety shell.
My social anxiety was treated with lexapro until I could do things better, but now that i'm off it I don't really talk to people if I can help it unless they're my age and not working. I also have this weird but not entirely crippling paranoia. I understand that paranoia implies mistrust, which I don't display a lot because I'm also a really really gullible and trusting person generally, but it's the closest thing I've really bothered to find. Just a lot of fear I guess.
High school was a gradual decline in grades and a gradual increase in my general capability to talk to people. I never dated out of a combination of fear and disinterest. My grades dropped for a few different reasons. The first is that teachers in high school start out very lax about homework being in on time. They remind you and then it works out. As time goes on, the brunt of it becoming my responsibility, I'd start to let things slide. At the same time, I'm already burned out. I was burned out by fifth grade. That's when I stopped homeschooling. I peaked in middle school. I did things then that I'm incapable of doing now. The one thing that remained mostly consistent was music, so I devoted my life to being stuff at league of legends and playing folk music. That has made me happy. I don't have to work really hard to be good at music, and it connects me to people in a way that isn't awkward or difficult. It's good for the soul. But, that isn't going to be my career. Making money with music is something that requires social skills.
I'll go to college for video game programming. I think I'll be pretty good at it, and it usually pays pretty well, and maybe sometime I'll get to work on something with a smaller team so I can do music and art for it. Then I'll really be happy.
Sorry for wall of text, I'm kinda working through it for myself more than anything. Therapeutic.
TL;DR I'm a nerd who peaked in 4th grade.
