Did you ever wonder why I have such abiding interests in fraud and stupidity? On the one hand charlatans, deception and lies. On the other hand people believing the patently false in religion, politics and everyday life. It's because I grew up with both on all sides.
My entire family is obsessed with the appearance of something called 'respectability'. This has nothing to do with mutual respect, and everything to do with presenting a front that quietly impresses strangers. Appearances are everything. Life is a performance. The judge of our worth is not an omniscient god but an omnipresent polite society.
It's a matter of being "educated", but only in the conventional vague platitudes about the cultural signposts that define the world of "well bred" people. Beethoven but not Glass, Shakespeare but not Beckett, Plato but not Russell.
We never actually listened to any Beethoven, saw Shakespeare performed, or read Plato. We just knew that Beethoven was a great composer whose deafness was a tradgedy bravely transcended, Shakespeare was a master of language as demonstrated by a small stock of memorised quotations, and Plato was a thinker from the cradle of civilisation.
The only social skill I learned in the home was to seem to be my parent's illusory version of "an understated cut above the rest". As a child, I knew how to be quiet but academically promising, but not how to talk to other people. I was taught that other people were uncouth and somehow threatening, and I'm still afraid of them.
When my parents discovered I was gay, their only concern was that other people might find out and they be shamed. My father was worried that his business clients wouldn't want to do business with him anymore. My mother feared that I would get expelled from sixth form college for being queer.
When I spent five and a half months in a prison cell, they told everyone (including close family) that I'd had a nervous breakdown and was in a mental institution - being drugged in a padded cell was more respectable than having a criminal record for getting into a punch up with your alchoholic boyfriend. I think if they could have plausibly claimed I was in Kenya on safari they would have preferred that.
I have a younger brother who is precisely what my parents wanted. Smart but banal, a genuine expert in his field but not an innovator, independant but in constant touch. Something went wrong in making me like that.
Like the rest of my family, I'm in awe of educated, "cultured" people and think that by being well read I can become admired and therefore accepted into "better circles of people". Unlike them I want my understanding to go beyond polite cliches, and it kills me that I can't do it.
Like them, I'm obsessively fearful of my own inadaquacy, but unable to persuade myself that I'm special after all. I have all the self doubt but none of the self deception, all the fears and aspirations but none of the reassuring certainties.
I was raised to be a fraud. I want to be the real thing. But it seems I'm no good at being either.
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"They Fuck You Up, Your Mum and Dad"
ReplyDeleteOh yes they do, but then that's the job description.
You may bemoan the sense that you have not achieved to the full measure that you would have liked and such a sentiment is regrettable.
ReplyDeleteFar worse however, is to have been tacitly trashed through indifference and sometimes, outright hostility.
Even a few 'memorised quotes' of Shakespeare, or a very sketchy knowledge of Plato and the fact that he was 'a thinker from the cradle of civilisation' is perhaps better than knowing little besides the line-up of the England football team, the particular quirks and idiosyncracies of this year's crop of basket cases in the Big Brother® 'household', or the latest plot twists in EastEnders.
There really are worse things than a delayed sense of anomie derived from a perceived failure to 'live up to' middle class expectations and aspirations.
I think being 'academically promising' is actually more important that 'knowing how to talk to people', unless of course, talking to people is part of the process of extending your academic reach.
Some men define freedom as the ability to put distance between themselves and others without unduly compromising their material quality of life or in other words, not being penalised for refusing to be dominated by the force of other men's personalities.
When you mention that 'I was taught that other people were uncouth and somehow threatening,', then surely your own experiences will have either confirmed or disproved such notions? When you go on to mention that '...and I'm still afraid of them.', again, your own experiences might legitimate that sentiment.
You have many if not most of the necessary foundations to build upon and even if extending yourself to 'more than polite cliches' is back-breakingly hard work, you have a choice and the opportunity to choose.
NABP:
ReplyDelete"Far worse however, is to have been tacitly trashed through indifference and sometimes, outright hostility."
This is cirtainly true. It's one thing to be given a yardstick of personal worth by people who judge you to have failed whether you fall short or exceed its measure or succeed only by someone else's yardstick.
It's another thing entirely to be told there's no point in giving you any yardstick because you'd always fail. To grow up bombarded by the notion that you are innately worthless. Perhaps that's part of the difference between middle class and working class.
"There really are worse things than a delayed sense of anomie derived from a perceived failure to 'live up to' middle class expectations and aspirations."
Again this is true. But this is a personal blog written mostly about me, my thoughts and experiences. The brief is not to analyse society in general, or really to compare my relative fortune or misfortune with that of others.
"I think being 'academically promising' is actually more important that 'knowing how to talk to people'"
When I wrote about showing promise, I meant that I was provided with the skill of 'showing promise', but not with the skills to fulfil that promise.
As for talking to people, it is a useful collection of skills to have, though one with small and highly unpredictable returns. Smalltalk about football and Big Brother(R) is ghastly and almost always useless, but explaining to a client in simple terms what is and isn't easy to create on a webpage comes in handy.
"When you mention that 'I was taught that other people were uncouth and somehow threatening,', then surely your own experiences will have either confirmed or disproved such notions? When you go on to mention that '...and I'm still afraid of them.', again, your own experiences might legitimate that sentiment."
Being afraid of other people ab initio makes it doubly difficult to find others who are worth knowing. It also makes it difficult to get experiences which prove or disprove it.
"You have many if not most of the necessary foundations to build upon and even if extending yourself to 'more than polite cliches' is back-breakingly hard work, you have a choice and the opportunity to choose."
It's not impossible - I could climb back on the wagon, and I want to. I just have a pervading sense that I've lost the main quality which would make it so much easier - youth. Learning, inventing and experimenting seemed so much easier when I was under 25.