So some of you may know me from some of the threads I've made here about girl issues and other life problems. Well the issue came up again today while I was on a college sponsored trip to the mall get some supplies for my Senior Thesis class.
While there I got into a debate with one of my classmates over the effects one's past can have on them, and particularly in the area of social skills, mainly if they can come naturally or if they must be learned. When the topic got back to me and my lack of social ability and the fact that I've never even been on a date, ever and I came off with the snappy remark of "Yeah, well when you grow up like I did you tend to learn that everyone sucks equally and that tends to impair your ability to relate to other people. Particularly if you are constantly reminded that you don't have anything in common with your peers and do better than them in pretty much everything if you put the slightest bit of effort into it."
At this point I got derided for having my standards too high and trying to buy in too high and that because of that I'm miserable. I replied that I'm not miserable; I just accept the fact that I'm alone and likely will be for the rest of my life. I again retorted that if you grew up like me that you'd have "girl troubles" too.
At this point one of the women who is in our class who had only really been kind of participating in our conversation demanded to know what I was talking about and what could really be so bad about it.
Now I've told the abridged version of my life story more times than I can count. But I decide to ask if they wanted to hear that version or if they wanted to hear the full "Tonight on Dateline" version. They said they wanted the full version.
What follows, for you judgement, opinion on the conversation and what I said earlier is the true story I told them, edited only for some brevity and the slight input I left out or add in for this version.
I'm 21 and a male, just for reference to make the story make sense.
I grew up in a poor family. Not poverty poor, but I've never gone on vacation anywhere ever, I never got a lot of the things my classmates did until about middle school and because of where I lived it was fairly isolated; though I still caught on the major trends - Pokemon knows no geographic or economic boundaries after all. There were exactly two other people my age on the street; my female cousin and my one male friend.
Early school years weren't not good for me. My mother had always been more insistent on learning and reading and so on, and as such I was well ahead of all my classmates pretty much every year. I was already different in that way and added in that I was from the sticks and didn't know about much of the stuff they did, I was none too popular. So even in Pre-school, I was the out kid and was left out of most things. Great start, right?
Well things started to get bad during Kindergarten and Elementary School. It went from being the "out kid" to being "every single kid fucking hates me". I was beat up by EVERYONE; boys, girls, nerds, "smart" kids and dumb kids. I was constantly teased and left out - teachers had to force kids to let me into their groups. I didn't think I did anything deserving of it; I thought I tried to be nice and share, but it didn't seem to work and initially I did get rather....ornery when people made fun of me and tried to fight back and generally didn't help myself at times.
I wound up going through three different elementary schools because of this. One of the nuns at the private school my parents tried selling me to told them something was just "honestly wrong" with men and that maybe God was punishing me or them.
Yeah, thanks God. I feel the love.
So I get to the final elementary school.....maybe 2nd Grade, though I'm still on time with the rest of my peers. By now I've been going through years of this kind of thing; in today's world I'd probably would've been on like 7 different Watch Lists and been sent to counseling a dozen times over. But no, this was an older time and I didn't look disturbed (I honestly wasn't in my own world, but the catch being that was just me) so I just got shuffled in with the rest.
This last school system was great. And by great, I'm mean terrible. I regularly got punished for things that weren't my fault, including getting a detention for ambushed by fucking 3 people and almost breaking my nose. And classes were so pathetic and boring that I regularly got in trouble for being disruptive.
However, about 3rd Grade is when I got my hands on my first video game. I had been playing outside during Summer Break, fell out of tree and broke my collar bone. No summer camp for me. But my parents needed something for me to do other than Lego and Lincoln Logs. So they bought the first game system I'd ever seen. And I god damn loved it. Kid who has his summer ruined damn near gets delivered to Valhalla. Life changing experience you might say.
School continues as was normal (for me). Its about 4th Grade when I get my second gift; the gift of cable TV......and ANIME. If anime was a drug then I straight injected that shit into my fucking veins. I devoured it. Couldn't get enough of it. I practically didn't care who it was for; I watched it all. I saw the episode of NGE where UNIT 01 eats the AT Core out of the Angel when I was in 6th Grade on Toonami. I watched Slayers. Anime was good times; and my love of video games had only grown.
Now, slight pause. You might wondering where my parents are in all this. Well, lets just it wasn't terribly......good. While my mother wasn't abusive or bad per say, she was kind of distant and didn't stop my father. My father's favorite (read: only) form of punishment was either hard chores or beatings; he preferred the latter up until about 6th Grade when he stopped for one reason or another starting to prefer groundings and restrictions instead. My parents also aren't a very good model of a "happy couple" if you catch my drift. (I left the part about my parents out of the story I have them)
And on that happy note I'll give you a moment for a break.
So school continued for me as normal. Still got picked on and beat up on by everyone, including the girls. It came to a head in 5th Grade when I got attacked by a mob of at least 13 kids - I don't exactly recall because I lost track while getting ass beat in. After they had finished the girls came over and made fun of me to, salt-in-wounds and all. When the kids faced little to no punishment for this my parents finally said "Enough" and made plans to send me to private school; after the one friend I had in my next neighbor.
And so off I went to CBA. Not a stay-away school, but I thought that was appropriately dramatic. A Catholic, JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) mandatory school. Being an atheist, the former was not a thrilling prospect; the latter was though. I expected a lot of things to change and be better.
Eh.....a little of good, a little of bad.
No females other than teaching staff. Still got made fun of to no end, though not beaten up because of Dean of Discipline would gone apeshit on anyone who did that.
But the JROTC....oh, the JROTC. I was good at it. Real good. And classes were finally challenging. Not hard, but I actually had a try just a little in some of them (until my Senior year, where I put no effort in and got As and Bs in everything). Suffice to say, it was an improvement, if not the improvement a psychologist would've recommended.
However, what little contact I did have with the opposite gender still didn't go well. I was still made fun of, but now it hurt worse because you know, I was a teenager and I actually understood it now and had feelings that could be hurt by time.
Anime and video games continued to my biggest fun factors and hobbies throughout this time, with a brief sojourn into model building.
By the time I was a Junior things took a turn for the better. For one, people stop picking on me; either out of respect or they just figured it was bad idea to keep picking on the guy who outranked them now. The second was that I finally what was arguably my first non-negative contact with a woman.
She was someone's sister who was a Senior at the all-women version of our school, though they didn't have a JROTC program there. She was smart. Kind. Funny. Liked games enough to know how to play them.
And I'll be damned if I don't say that she didn't look exactly like god damn Tifa Lockhart.
No lie. Apparently completely natural too, though I never bothered to ask. (I kind of figured, since she and her family weren't much better off than mine) If you're thinking I went completely off the deep end when I met her you'd be right......if she hadn't had a boyfriend twice my height who looked like he'd been ripped straight from Chippendale's and had a damn 4.0 GPA and was Captain of every sport invented in this universe and the next including Grifball.
But by my Senior I basically ran the school; never went to any religious functions any more, could basically do what I wanted when I wanted so long as I showed up for tests and such 9though what I wanted to do usually just involved staying in class and talking to teachers) and I was the guy in charge of bailing out the other JROTC leaders when they screwed up as well as being in charge of Freshman Orientation even though I was only a 2nd LT.
Then I graduated and went to the school that founded America's ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) as a civilian to study, of all things, Psychology. Even though now freed from my JROTC and ROTC requirements, I'm still way lower key than practically everyone else on campus; as some of you can attest from my other threads I've made hear I probably have one of the cleanest and most orderly dorm rooms in America.
And so I brought with me my love of anime and video games and all the social stigmas those carry. And my deep dislike of crowded places, loud senseless noise and social situations. In my Senior year, still not a date in sight. The only time I've even come close is again another rare encounter I had; my freshman year here there was another absolutely stunning beauty as a freshman. Imagine a short-haired, older, far less ditzy version of Orihime to get the appropriate idea.
But she left by the second semester. I never got even know her; like I had chance competing against every other male at this school (and at least one woman I think too).
And so that is my story. How a poor country (essentially) boy wound up in the position he is in at a college with a 7:1 male/female ratio with no Anime Club, a Video Game club he isn't allowed to go to anymore (for absolutely dominating a couple of their tournaments) and the inability to get along with most people, much less women.
After I finished no one really said anything other than, "Wow, thats really sad" or "That's terrible". Needless to say, I think I made my point that one's past can really affect how they can work in the future.
Of course I know a few of you are going to ask why I simply don't use my Psychology training on myself. Simple answer; self-diagnosis tends not to work too well. As for therapy, I have gone before. It didn't work too well, and this year the therapist is what I'd call "nuts" as he believes that everything in life somehow relates to death even though I've heard his presentation and the guy that inspired him and don't believe a word of it at all.
So what say you Escapist?
While there I got into a debate with one of my classmates over the effects one's past can have on them, and particularly in the area of social skills, mainly if they can come naturally or if they must be learned. When the topic got back to me and my lack of social ability and the fact that I've never even been on a date, ever and I came off with the snappy remark of "Yeah, well when you grow up like I did you tend to learn that everyone sucks equally and that tends to impair your ability to relate to other people. Particularly if you are constantly reminded that you don't have anything in common with your peers and do better than them in pretty much everything if you put the slightest bit of effort into it."
At this point I got derided for having my standards too high and trying to buy in too high and that because of that I'm miserable. I replied that I'm not miserable; I just accept the fact that I'm alone and likely will be for the rest of my life. I again retorted that if you grew up like me that you'd have "girl troubles" too.
At this point one of the women who is in our class who had only really been kind of participating in our conversation demanded to know what I was talking about and what could really be so bad about it.
Now I've told the abridged version of my life story more times than I can count. But I decide to ask if they wanted to hear that version or if they wanted to hear the full "Tonight on Dateline" version. They said they wanted the full version.
What follows, for you judgement, opinion on the conversation and what I said earlier is the true story I told them, edited only for some brevity and the slight input I left out or add in for this version.
I'm 21 and a male, just for reference to make the story make sense.
I grew up in a poor family. Not poverty poor, but I've never gone on vacation anywhere ever, I never got a lot of the things my classmates did until about middle school and because of where I lived it was fairly isolated; though I still caught on the major trends - Pokemon knows no geographic or economic boundaries after all. There were exactly two other people my age on the street; my female cousin and my one male friend.
Early school years weren't not good for me. My mother had always been more insistent on learning and reading and so on, and as such I was well ahead of all my classmates pretty much every year. I was already different in that way and added in that I was from the sticks and didn't know about much of the stuff they did, I was none too popular. So even in Pre-school, I was the out kid and was left out of most things. Great start, right?
Well things started to get bad during Kindergarten and Elementary School. It went from being the "out kid" to being "every single kid fucking hates me". I was beat up by EVERYONE; boys, girls, nerds, "smart" kids and dumb kids. I was constantly teased and left out - teachers had to force kids to let me into their groups. I didn't think I did anything deserving of it; I thought I tried to be nice and share, but it didn't seem to work and initially I did get rather....ornery when people made fun of me and tried to fight back and generally didn't help myself at times.
I wound up going through three different elementary schools because of this. One of the nuns at the private school my parents tried selling me to told them something was just "honestly wrong" with men and that maybe God was punishing me or them.
Yeah, thanks God. I feel the love.
So I get to the final elementary school.....maybe 2nd Grade, though I'm still on time with the rest of my peers. By now I've been going through years of this kind of thing; in today's world I'd probably would've been on like 7 different Watch Lists and been sent to counseling a dozen times over. But no, this was an older time and I didn't look disturbed (I honestly wasn't in my own world, but the catch being that was just me) so I just got shuffled in with the rest.
This last school system was great. And by great, I'm mean terrible. I regularly got punished for things that weren't my fault, including getting a detention for ambushed by fucking 3 people and almost breaking my nose. And classes were so pathetic and boring that I regularly got in trouble for being disruptive.
However, about 3rd Grade is when I got my hands on my first video game. I had been playing outside during Summer Break, fell out of tree and broke my collar bone. No summer camp for me. But my parents needed something for me to do other than Lego and Lincoln Logs. So they bought the first game system I'd ever seen. And I god damn loved it. Kid who has his summer ruined damn near gets delivered to Valhalla. Life changing experience you might say.
School continues as was normal (for me). Its about 4th Grade when I get my second gift; the gift of cable TV......and ANIME. If anime was a drug then I straight injected that shit into my fucking veins. I devoured it. Couldn't get enough of it. I practically didn't care who it was for; I watched it all. I saw the episode of NGE where UNIT 01 eats the AT Core out of the Angel when I was in 6th Grade on Toonami. I watched Slayers. Anime was good times; and my love of video games had only grown.
Now, slight pause. You might wondering where my parents are in all this. Well, lets just it wasn't terribly......good. While my mother wasn't abusive or bad per say, she was kind of distant and didn't stop my father. My father's favorite (read: only) form of punishment was either hard chores or beatings; he preferred the latter up until about 6th Grade when he stopped for one reason or another starting to prefer groundings and restrictions instead. My parents also aren't a very good model of a "happy couple" if you catch my drift. (I left the part about my parents out of the story I have them)
And on that happy note I'll give you a moment for a break.
So school continued for me as normal. Still got picked on and beat up on by everyone, including the girls. It came to a head in 5th Grade when I got attacked by a mob of at least 13 kids - I don't exactly recall because I lost track while getting ass beat in. After they had finished the girls came over and made fun of me to, salt-in-wounds and all. When the kids faced little to no punishment for this my parents finally said "Enough" and made plans to send me to private school; after the one friend I had in my next neighbor.
And so off I went to CBA. Not a stay-away school, but I thought that was appropriately dramatic. A Catholic, JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) mandatory school. Being an atheist, the former was not a thrilling prospect; the latter was though. I expected a lot of things to change and be better.
Eh.....a little of good, a little of bad.
No females other than teaching staff. Still got made fun of to no end, though not beaten up because of Dean of Discipline would gone apeshit on anyone who did that.
But the JROTC....oh, the JROTC. I was good at it. Real good. And classes were finally challenging. Not hard, but I actually had a try just a little in some of them (until my Senior year, where I put no effort in and got As and Bs in everything). Suffice to say, it was an improvement, if not the improvement a psychologist would've recommended.
However, what little contact I did have with the opposite gender still didn't go well. I was still made fun of, but now it hurt worse because you know, I was a teenager and I actually understood it now and had feelings that could be hurt by time.
Anime and video games continued to my biggest fun factors and hobbies throughout this time, with a brief sojourn into model building.
By the time I was a Junior things took a turn for the better. For one, people stop picking on me; either out of respect or they just figured it was bad idea to keep picking on the guy who outranked them now. The second was that I finally what was arguably my first non-negative contact with a woman.
She was someone's sister who was a Senior at the all-women version of our school, though they didn't have a JROTC program there. She was smart. Kind. Funny. Liked games enough to know how to play them.
And I'll be damned if I don't say that she didn't look exactly like god damn Tifa Lockhart.
No lie. Apparently completely natural too, though I never bothered to ask. (I kind of figured, since she and her family weren't much better off than mine) If you're thinking I went completely off the deep end when I met her you'd be right......if she hadn't had a boyfriend twice my height who looked like he'd been ripped straight from Chippendale's and had a damn 4.0 GPA and was Captain of every sport invented in this universe and the next including Grifball.
But by my Senior I basically ran the school; never went to any religious functions any more, could basically do what I wanted when I wanted so long as I showed up for tests and such 9though what I wanted to do usually just involved staying in class and talking to teachers) and I was the guy in charge of bailing out the other JROTC leaders when they screwed up as well as being in charge of Freshman Orientation even though I was only a 2nd LT.
Then I graduated and went to the school that founded America's ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) as a civilian to study, of all things, Psychology. Even though now freed from my JROTC and ROTC requirements, I'm still way lower key than practically everyone else on campus; as some of you can attest from my other threads I've made hear I probably have one of the cleanest and most orderly dorm rooms in America.
And so I brought with me my love of anime and video games and all the social stigmas those carry. And my deep dislike of crowded places, loud senseless noise and social situations. In my Senior year, still not a date in sight. The only time I've even come close is again another rare encounter I had; my freshman year here there was another absolutely stunning beauty as a freshman. Imagine a short-haired, older, far less ditzy version of Orihime to get the appropriate idea.
But she left by the second semester. I never got even know her; like I had chance competing against every other male at this school (and at least one woman I think too).
And so that is my story. How a poor country (essentially) boy wound up in the position he is in at a college with a 7:1 male/female ratio with no Anime Club, a Video Game club he isn't allowed to go to anymore (for absolutely dominating a couple of their tournaments) and the inability to get along with most people, much less women.
After I finished no one really said anything other than, "Wow, thats really sad" or "That's terrible". Needless to say, I think I made my point that one's past can really affect how they can work in the future.
Of course I know a few of you are going to ask why I simply don't use my Psychology training on myself. Simple answer; self-diagnosis tends not to work too well. As for therapy, I have gone before. It didn't work too well, and this year the therapist is what I'd call "nuts" as he believes that everything in life somehow relates to death even though I've heard his presentation and the guy that inspired him and don't believe a word of it at all.
So what say you Escapist?
