Well, here I am. Starting to write this post several hours after informing no less than three friends that I was already working on it.
Guess there's something to be said for external accountability.
In a weird way, not counting my brother's implicit tyranny or my generally sheltered upbringing, discovering feminism is what fucked me up the most.
I mostly thought girls were just not-boys. It doesn't help that the (Catholic) school I went to for nine years kept us segregated. I didn't talk to the girls much because virtually none of them took the public bus home. It irks me to think just how different my life might have been if we'd just got me on the school bus instead.
Women were different, and while I knew that in theory I had no understanding of it. I never received any form of the sex talk from my parents ... or rather, it wasn't a talk so much as a book that my father gave me and told me not to read until my 13th birthday. Of course I read it pretty much immediately. And wouldn't you know it, I had already seen what genitals looked like in the encyclopedia. 'Adolescence' was in there too, and it held little interest for me even as I began to experience it.
I didn't understand that periods were a real thing, even as I read about it in the encyclopedia. I found the part about airplanes far more interesting. I didn't know how women experience the world differently, because the only one who might have been close to me and shown me - my sister - departed for college in America when I was 11. As time went on, I became afraid to talk to girls, and I never truly understood why. It's a telling thought that I lived next to a beautiful girl - who was in my year - for many years, and barely knew of her existence until we had nearly graduated.
All of this is ancillary. I can't pinpoint a specific event that led to me being so introverted. Nor can I quite explain how I reinvented myself once I went to college. It was there in the USA that I realized the importance of a hug, and this has shaped me ever since. Not counting my early youth, in the years that I needed it most I wasn't really familiar with human touch that was more than momentary or rough. Gently holding a girl's hand, for example, at Mass during the 'offering of peace', was something I'd hardly experienced before. This is among the few things that kept me attending church in the USA, God be damned. The chance to hold a person's hand, and share an experience with them. What actually fucked me up was finding out all the shit that goes on around that simple desire.
The literal and metaphorical meaning of 'harmony' is something that is lost on the average self-righteous Catholic here. I need harmony in my life. I need a catalyst to lower the bar that must cross to get the ball rolling.
I need to sleep.
Guess there's something to be said for external accountability.
In a weird way, not counting my brother's implicit tyranny or my generally sheltered upbringing, discovering feminism is what fucked me up the most.
I mostly thought girls were just not-boys. It doesn't help that the (Catholic) school I went to for nine years kept us segregated. I didn't talk to the girls much because virtually none of them took the public bus home. It irks me to think just how different my life might have been if we'd just got me on the school bus instead.
Women were different, and while I knew that in theory I had no understanding of it. I never received any form of the sex talk from my parents ... or rather, it wasn't a talk so much as a book that my father gave me and told me not to read until my 13th birthday. Of course I read it pretty much immediately. And wouldn't you know it, I had already seen what genitals looked like in the encyclopedia. 'Adolescence' was in there too, and it held little interest for me even as I began to experience it.
I didn't understand that periods were a real thing, even as I read about it in the encyclopedia. I found the part about airplanes far more interesting. I didn't know how women experience the world differently, because the only one who might have been close to me and shown me - my sister - departed for college in America when I was 11. As time went on, I became afraid to talk to girls, and I never truly understood why. It's a telling thought that I lived next to a beautiful girl - who was in my year - for many years, and barely knew of her existence until we had nearly graduated.
All of this is ancillary. I can't pinpoint a specific event that led to me being so introverted. Nor can I quite explain how I reinvented myself once I went to college. It was there in the USA that I realized the importance of a hug, and this has shaped me ever since. Not counting my early youth, in the years that I needed it most I wasn't really familiar with human touch that was more than momentary or rough. Gently holding a girl's hand, for example, at Mass during the 'offering of peace', was something I'd hardly experienced before. This is among the few things that kept me attending church in the USA, God be damned. The chance to hold a person's hand, and share an experience with them. What actually fucked me up was finding out all the shit that goes on around that simple desire.
The literal and metaphorical meaning of 'harmony' is something that is lost on the average self-righteous Catholic here. I need harmony in my life. I need a catalyst to lower the bar that must cross to get the ball rolling.
I need to sleep.
