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There is this prevailing attitude lately that it’s gauche and annoying to talk about your childhood unless you’ve suffered some sort of devastating violence or trauma.
I’ve seen a number of people say, “No one cares what a weird kid you were. All kids were weird.” And yeah. It helps a lot knowing that you aren’t alone in having been a social outcast with interests no one else seemed to share.
But a lot of us are still struggling to undo the conditioning we received, are still living with shame and trying to love the children we once were.
And it’s a natural thing, I think, to reckon with one’s childhood. We are creatures of memory. The past visits us in nearly every moment and is never really gone.
The people who say “everyone was a weird kid” sound an awful lot like the people who brushed it off when you said you were struggling, the people who told you to just try harder, to just get over it.
What I hear when people say “no one cares what a weird kid you were” is, you’re fine now, focus on acting like a normal adult, what happened back then has no bearing on who you are now.
That there’s no need to love your childhood self in order to love yourself. As if you aren’t that person anymore, as if thinking about the past is just a masturbatory exercise for navel-gazers and attention-seekers.
Yes, I’m a lot less boring these days than I was as a kid. And I’m able to perform normalcy pretty well. I don’t experience constant social rejection, although I’m not exactly rolling in friends. I know this applies to so many of us.
While the Internet has allowed for a lot of normalization of experience, it has also given us a lot less patience for people who struggle with feelings of isolation and difference, many of which have their roots in childhood.
Intellectually you can grasp that you’re not the only one, but emotional trauma doesn’t always respond to reason.
And it’s funny too, because we all talk about our own experiences online, but we tend to automatically assume that others are sharing their experiences because they somehow “think they’re special”.
Even when I’m writing in a private journal I internalize those ideas that certain subjects are silly and not worth writing about. And I guess that’s a me problem.
The Internet does make me feel like someone’s always watching and judging, or could potentially be. I got that feeling from time to time before social media was our lives, but now it’s pervasive.
In a way that keeps us accountable, but my OCD brain takes it to extremes. Everything I commit to paper must be completely accurate, tasteful, and unique. (I don’t commit much to paper these days).
