Living With Yourself: Part One

You didn't raise yourself. You were not born knowing the differential calculus. You gave up the piano lessons, remember? That would be why you can't play Blue in Green now. Someone taught you to swim, you had trainer wheels on your bicycle, and there were all those driving lessons. You didn't just ace the test first time you stepped into a car. Name anything you can do and you learned it from someone. The way you suck up to the boss with such dignity? You learned that at Oxford – it's what they really teach there. About the only thing a kid can do on their own is screw up: from burning their hands on the cooker to puking up because they drank too much from Daddy's whisky bottle to getting lost when they went for a walk on holiday and getting Mary (age 14) pregnant. You want to get much right in this world and you need guidance.

You may not have been paying attention at the time. You may not have the maths or the double-somersault gene. You may have had lousy teachers and parents, and you may have fallen in with the wrong crowd at school or in the neighbourhood and adopted ideas and attitudes way above or below your station. You may have gone to the wrong school, no-one noticed your reading difficulties or exceptional talent at tennis. They may have, but they didn't give a damn. You may have received the perfect upbringing for a child with well-connected parents, but yours weren't.

There are so many ways everyone involved can screw up raising a child that everyone comes out of their teenage years with some rough patches, confusion, hurts, pain and missing competencies. I hear they can come out with some polish, strength, skills and happiness – but I think that's just hype put out by expensive fee-paying schools. This does not mean that “everyone is messed up” because there's a difference between not being able to draw a recognisable face (not messed up) and not being spaced out on downers at age fifteen (messed up). It means “nobody can do it all”.

There is no one right way to be a person. There are a few really wrong ways (psychopath, serial killer, rapist, degenerate gambler, drug addict, useless drunk, downsizing CEO, corrupt policeman, child abuser, paedophile, human traffiker, pimp, Taliban, slaughtering dictator and their henchmen, actually, quite a few ways of being a Bad Person) but the rest are okay. You may talk on your mobile on the train, install loud alarms in your cars and house that go off for no reason at two in the morning, not pay your due bills and use power tools on a Sunday evening, but that just makes you an anti-social jerk.

What matters is how much pain you are in living the life you lead. Not regret or sorrow, actual pain. One of the little-noticed clauses about the notorious personality disorders in DSM-VI is that to qualify you have to be in pain and not functioning well. That's what anti-social jerks are: people with personality disorders who don't feel any pain and pay their bills. This pain can come from two sources: because you really are missing out on something you would be a lot better off if you had, or because you think there's something wrong with you because you aren't doing whatever it is, and whatever it is happens to be, in the list of things, optional.

I, for instance, don't do fun. I'm fine with this until the company insists I go on some frakking day out where we listen to empty, generic speeches from the high mucka-mucks and spend the afternoon playing a silly game. On that day I am as miserable as Job and for the same reason: I am suffering torments inflicted by Satan. What's worse is I keep thinking it's my fault. It isn't. Those just aren't my strokes, and I am no longer going to pretend that they should be.

And I'm not terribly good at making a social life. I have some friends, but I don't have a social circle and I miss that whenever I see signs that other people do have one. Just as much of my life, at my age, looks like it does so I don't have to be around squalling kids and irritable parents, or loud partying young people, so I avoid anything that reminds me that people have friends and do things like have eight of them rent a villa in Tuscany for a week. I think I'm missing out there. As I say, I have a lot of tricks for not noticing it, but it still hurts when I do.

Now I am prepared to believe the therapists and wise men when they tell me I would be better off with a social life. I am not prepared to believe anybody if they tell me I would be better off being able to tolerate corporate BS days. I think that might involve the loss of faculties I find quite valuable for the rest of the year.

If you are wondering what I meant by “actual pain” back there, congratulations: you either have everything you need to live a productive and successful life, or are happily adjusted to your limitations, or of course, are an anti-social jerk. If you aren't sure, it isn't you.

I'm just getting started on this.