Years and Years of Therapy

I think, and I could be totally wrong about this, that smart people and educated people have the potential to make themselves crazier then people less gifted or less learned. Why do I say this? I tend to think of myself as a fairly smart guy and at the same time I a seriously flawed. This being a new year lets spend a bit picking apart some of that crazy for the world (or at least the small part of it that visits this section of the internet).

I was shy growing up. I've never really gotten over that. At family gatherings a relative I wouldn't be familiar with would come up to my mother to talk to her and would then start to address me. I would hide behind my mothers legs and say something like, "Mommy she is talking to me. Make her stop." As I got older I would refuse to order the pizza or call someone I didn't know on the telephone for any reason, because I didn't like talking to strangers. At new jobs I usually kept to myself, ate my lunch apart and read. I took working in a bar and spending a lot of time drunk to really open me up to where I don't completely dread social encounters. I'm not sure how many brain cells were destroyed for this breakthrough, but I know I'm no where near as bright or as capable a problem solver as I was ten years ago.

Women were always a problem. I didn't really have an adequate amount of interaction with them as a teenager. I spent my high school years in a catholic all boys school, hanging out with my fellow geeks. Not one of us had a girlfriend the four years of high school. There was also the weight self esteem thing. I was terrified to approach women, because I was overweight and "knew" that it meant rejection. I didn't learn about the importance of attitude until much later in life.

I went away to school for the first time completely unable to cope with society. My roommate moved in with a friend after the first couple days and after the next guy got himself kicked out after a few days, the folks decided they would pay the extra money to let me keep the room as a single. Bad move. I took all my meals in my room. The only person I knew from back home was graduating at the end of that year. A year away from friends and family boxed up in a tiny room ninety percent of the time was more than I could deal with so I transferred back to Chicago without ever having to really deal with people.

It wasn't until I was 21 that I first had sex, and while men often claim there is no such thing as a bad sexual experience I am here to testify that there is. She was thirty, we were drunk and it was like throwing a hot dog down the grand canyon. (This did nothing to bolster my esteem in my Irish inches). I had so built up the idea of sex in my mind, over the years that by the time it happened I was somewhat disgusted. She mostly just laid there, there was almost no friction and no real emotional involvement. It seemed so animalistic. I was no longer able to perform.

So later when I had a different encounter with someone closer to my age (though I'm pretty sure a lot of booze was involved) I thought it would be different. It was worse. The woman was hurt because she thought I didn't find her attractive.

So this is when I got really analytical. I thought ok maybe I'm really a repressed homosexual. I'm not going into details. Lets just say that I'm not. (And I'm about >< that close to deleting this statement).

So periodically over the years I would have terrible relationships with women. We would become friends. They would see that I was attracted to them, yet be totally clueless as to why I never asked them out or made any sort of agressive moves like other men do. Then I would become angry with them as they went their own way and had relationships with other men. Of course, I never talk about it. I would try to with my younger brother but he would tell me that I just need to drink some orange juice before hand. The idea of such an un manning of a problem is to much, especially in ones brother, it is too close to home. My older brother and I never really talked about much of anything, even though we always got along much better than I do with my younger brother. To many years between us.

Now, the world is innundated with commercials about things like viagra and ED. These things may not actually work for me, what with my problems mostly being in my head and the fact that I have high blood pressure, but just it allows men to talk about it much more openly. I can contemplate a future with a partner. No guarantees of course, I've got thirty years of bad habits, unemployment and unhealthy superiority about my own intelligence to overcome not to mention my inablity to drink socially (without getting plastered and stealing everyones cigarettes) and my tendency to bury my head in teh endorphins of video gaming, but there is hope. It takes a long time to get used to idea of hope one was pretty much bent on the slow self destruction of booze.

Maybe we can pick apart more of the crazy laters.