I am, simply put, wrong.



I'm not normal, I'm not sane, I'm not handsome, or social, or athletic, or straight-forward, or easy to get along with. By the common understanding of those terms, I will never be normal, I will never be "right".



In childhood, I committed a crime. A crime for which I've been punished, abused, threatened, assaulted, and made to feel terminally inferior for. A crime I continue to commit to this day, and will go to my grave committing still.



I saw patterns. And delighted in finding them.



I saw so many and enjoyed them so much, I missed things. I saw the motion of the stars, before I learned the workings of the heavens and hells. I saw the beating of the heart and lungs, before I saw the meaning of the pulse and the breath. I saw the beauty of a population in action, before I even began to understand I was part of it.



In hindsight, the odds were stacked against me. I was short, I didn't fit the standard definition of what boys should be and how they should behaved, I was constantly compared to my brother, who by comparison was perfect, before I was compared to myself. It took my parents and carers years to realise I wasn't underfed or malnourished, I was just always sat next to a human bulldozer at dinnertime. I don't begrudge my twin, none of what I went through was his fault, nor could it have been. We don't see eye to eye on a lot of things, but he's my brother, and he'll see him down the aisle before I see him buried beneath my childhood.



While he remained my marking point, I was compared to serial killers, sex offenders, and raving lunatics, before the notion ever appeared that maybe, just maybe, I was myself. I was this weird thing in class, with weird behaviours, weird fascinations, weird words and sentences. Nothing about me was ever normal.



And when you're a kid, still learning what plants breath and how multiplication works, whatever isn't "right" is instantly "wrong". And you're taught that all wrong answers are scrubbed out with a rubber, long before you're taught about the right answers you can draw from them.



There's not a being in this world I would wish my childhood upon. I cried, I looked for a pattern to understand, a step to fix it, and none came. So then I hated, first myself, then everyone, then everything. When at last the world was filled with hate, I just stopped altogether. What do you feel when you feel the same thing towards everything? For me, it was nothing. I know today a lot of people don't get very far past this stage, that I'm lucky to have done so in that regard, but that doesn't help the little kid in the dark of his room at night. He doesn't feel lucky, because he doesn't feel anything.



In the final years of secondary school, things finally started to click together. Patterns started to become more obvious. Teachers noticed I wasn't happy, wasn't fitting in where I should, and instead of ignoring it or shoving against it, they acknowledge it. Perhaps its no coincidence that many of my early supporters there were science teachers. Though they couldn't keep me fully guarded from those vicious patterns in the hallways or the back seats, I count my early happiness starting with them.



After a while and a few incidents, I started seeing professionals every once in a while. Eventually, a diagnosis was formed. Even at the time, it seemed perfect, at last a pattern appeared that explained what was off.



And it was that I didn't see the same patterns everyone else was. I was seeing an entire universe, while they were seeing an odd little boy staring intently at the knots in a wooden bench.



From there, I got more help. I learned where my patterns weren't fitting, and how to make them fit better. Not perfectly, but better. I learned to tell people I wasn't "right" and how it would make me not fit the patterns they worked with, and to try my best to help them and help myself.



One of the worst pieces of fallout from my childhood was an unfortunate piece of literary history. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. A short, strange, and constantly abused boy, with by chance an appropriate name, left me with a distinct loathing for one particular character. This is ironic, because he is the sole character forgiving of every fault and flaw in everyone around him, flawed as he is himself. History has made me despise Tiny Tim, but I cannot fault the child himself.



Today, my patterns are honed. My wrongs more precise, less generic, easier to evade and resolve, though I will live with them for the rest of my life, reacting to their every mutation and permutation. My heart, once filled with anger, then filled with stone, is softened. Cynical, perhaps even jaded, but it beats with kindness and warmth, as long as I remember that it beats at all. So much of me is still patterns, be they twisted, broken, or beautiful and flowing, and so much of me still is defense and damage from those years I spent a free man in the captivity of children. I live with that, I remember that.



And, though it still saddens me, and hurts me, to recall those days when the only thing keeping me from the end was knowing my patterns, I still see them. I still follow them.



And I still hope for the days when I can show them to everyone, and let them see what magnificent wonders that weird little boy was babbling about.



I will always be wrong. My heart will always be broken.



But from that error in construction and that malfunction of feeling, as my patterns have often told me, something strong and wonderful has persevered and survived.



My name is Tim Maughan, I am 22 years old. It got better.

Reply · Report Post