Why Am I an Outlier?

There's something that has bothered me for the last few years.  A numerical oddity that niggles at the recesses of my mind in the quieter moments of the day.  It's going to sound stupid, but it bothers me because the math doesn't add up.

I grew up very poor.  I've actually eaten government cheese, from the food bank, in the projects, as a standalone meal while my mother waited for her welfare check.  I lived in the worst neighborhoods with the worst neighbors.  I went to the worst schools and wore clothes that were a dozen years out of date thanks to the "hand-me-down railroad".  There was neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and in retrospect (though I didn't realize it until fairly recently) sexual abuse.

Even when I had earned opportunities to get ahead as a child, I inevitably had to turn them down because of money, transportation (aka, money), or the need for me to be at home taking care of my brothers (money, again).

The last grade I graduated was the 8th, having dropped out halfway through my freshman year of high school.  I never went to college, despite brilliant test scores.  I have an ACE score of 8.  I ended up homeless at 18, and had no family to turn to when the speed bumps of life came to knock down whatever house of cards I'd managed to cobble together for myself.  More than once I've lost literally - not figuratively - everything I owned.  I don't own a single artifact pre-dating my 18th year: Not a shred of clothing or a book or a trophy or a sentimental childhood possession - that one article that stretches so far into my past is a shirt that I purchased after I left home.  I happened to be wearing it when I became homeless the first time.  Not a single thing from my childhood remains - save for the facsimile of an adult that emerged from it.

By all accounts, I should still be in the ghetto collecting my own welfare checks with a dozen illegitimate children, a lengthy rap sheet, and - best case - a serious alcohol problem.

Keep in mind that this chart isn't taking all of those factors into account.  This is strictly evaluated by the income level of the parents.  Some of the poor children on this chart had rich grandparents, or a strong family or support structure.  By every predictor one might use to guess my outcome, I should be the model of poor white-trashery.

This is not what has happened.

I'm making 82k a year doing computer work in the healthcare industry for a major hospital system in Southern California.  That's square in the middle of the second highest quintile.  My existing skillset is both rare, and in demand, and this job is going to expand that skillset tremendously.  In a few years I will be able to earn top quintile income anywhere in the English speaking world.  I can write my own ticket.  It took me some time as a mercenary computer technician to get to this place in my career - I am nearly 40, after all - but the fact remains:  I'm not supposed to be doing this well.

There's more to my confusion than the quality of my career...

I've met a lot other people from similar backgrounds.  There is a syndrome that seems to follow them.  All too often they are deceitful, lazy, and not above stealing from others.  They are broken people with anger problems and drug problems and all the problems that come with those things.  I understand why they feel that the world gave them the short straw, but I don't understand why they never took responsibility and never made a plan.  They never fought their way out, too busy with penny-ante schemes;  Too full of excuses and poorly defined bad guys responsible for preventing them from being able to escape.  They eased into poverty like a comfortable overcoat.  There's a sort of unwillingness to empathize with other people - a meanness of sorts that is the hallmark of this type.  And there is depression and manic depression and schizophrenia and PTSD and all of that.  And it's all valid.

My youngest brothers exhibit this poverty syndrome, making it very difficult to isolate some kind of difference.

I try to see the wounded child in such people, but pragmatism demands that you protect yourself from the broken adult - A lesson learned by repeatedly trying and inevitably failing to help others out of a pit I was still climbing out of myself.  Eventually I learned:  Moving up means letting go of those who will not climb for themselves.

I see all of these people, their lack of concern for others and their lack of concern for themselves, and I can't help but wonder:

How the Hell did I make it out OK?

You only have my word for it, but I am an ethical person who goes out of his way to be nice to strangers.  I'll do the right thing, for a person I don't like, even if no one would ever know otherwise.  I'm not saying I'm some kind of pillar of altruistic piousness, but on a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of how decent I am when I stand to gain nothing from the being honorable, I'm a 7 or an 8.  When a storm starts blowing shopping carts around the parking lot, I chase them so they don't run into cars - Not because my car was in any danger, or even because I would hope someone would do the same for me, but because it's the right thing to do.  And perhaps because I feel like the world has its share of people who wouldn't.  Like it is better somehow to do something positive than to merely complain about the negative.  The last time this happened, there were people standing there, filming with their phones as carts went sailing into other people's cars.

I remember feeling angry with those people.  Not the anger of self-validating righteousness that feeds a sense of superiority, but disappointed, knowing they not only passed on the opportunity to serve others, but actively served their mere amusement through the misfortune of others.

Even talking about myself in an unabashedly positive light like this feels disingenuous and self-serving.  I am only comfortable doing so so because I am writing anonymously under a pseudonym (Surprise!  I'm not actually the Count of Monte Cristo).

I kind of wandered off the point, but it was necessary in order to place emphasis on the contrasts I see in myself, economically as well as behaviorally, when compared to the person I was so likely to have become.

And yet, at the same time, I don't feel that I've surpassed what I was supposed to be.  Instead, I look and see all of the opportunities to be a better person that I've missed in some way.  Despite my relative success, It is as if I have failed to live up to the person I could have been.

I've spent two decades of relentlessly pushing my way up the career chain, from sandwich artistry, to call-center tech support, to technical product management, back down to product support in another industry, and now laboratory systems support.  Every step along the way (save for one, where the economy knocked me back down for 5 years), I have striven to build my career, to leave every job with a better resume, and to be always improving.

At 18 I was homeless.

At 20 I lived in a studio apartment in a poor section of town.

At 24 I was living in a two bedroom apartment in a less slummy part of town.

By 28 I was renting a house.

At 35 I moved to the climate of my choosing.

At 38 I am living in an apartment, but it is a temporary measure to be close to my current job and save money and build credit, and experience.  I have no intention of staying in San Diego for a second longer than is demanded by my employer.  Something happens when you get too many people in one place.  It seems like the more people there are, the less human they become.

Poverty sticks to you

At no point do I feel like I've 'made it'.  Not in life, and certainly not in my career.  At best I feel as though I've beaten the system.  I constantly feel like a fraud masquerading amongst the real people.  An unwelcome interloper who has managed to infiltrate the business world by 'passing' as not poor.  Certainly there is someone who deserves this success more than I do.

And the nagging question returns.  Why me?  What did I bring to the table that kept me from going down the path of perpetual failure?  What factor makes me an exception, instead of the rule?  Why am I an outlier?  Why am I not broken?  Why am I not addicted, insane, or incarcerated?  I don't deserve it, so I don't understand it.

Then again, maybe I'm not an outlier.

Because money doesn't cure poverty.  I'm spending $350 a month for the cheapest Korean subcompact on the market, because I've never had any kind of credit before.  Had a longtime friend not stepped up to the plate and loaned me a few thousand dollars I would have been homeless, lost everything, and lost my job in the process.  I wasn't going to ask.  That's how deep and irrational my fear of being found out as poor is.  If this contract were to end tomorrow, I would be utterly destitute inside a month.

There is no safety net.  I got lucky the one time.  Actually, about 13 improbable things needed to line up perfectly for my plan to work - and when one thing fell short (company lied about the amount of hotel time I would have), my entire plan collapsed because the added costs of not having a place to live exceeded my budget for finding a place to live.

I make $82,000 a year, and I am a single cataclysm from irrecoverable poverty.  If this job works, My last three years and my next two combine to give me 5 years of relevant experience as a Lab Information Systems Analyst.  But if it doesn't, I'm left with product support experience but no clinical experience - and I'm back on the train to bottom rung call-center tech support for ~45k.

I make 82k and I am poor.  For most people, $82,000 doesn't sound like poor.  But factor the following - cheap rent for a borderline slum apartment with cockroaches and drug dealers in this area costs $21,000 a year.  State and federal Income taxes combine to run me around $21500 a year.  After taxes and rent, more than half of my income is gone.  The price of my staple food (eggs) has tripled in this region because of local laws concerning the treatment of chickens.  Fucking proposition 2.

And I still have to finish paying off the old bills from the previous place - because everything went into this move.

Perhaps I am not an outlier, and I am doomed to face the same economic problems I have fought to escape my entire life.  But I am trying to be cognizant of the need for planning.  The need for frugality and responsibility.  I am learning that rather than "having something to show" for my money, I need to be using it to build stability, so that one day I might pay my own mortgage instead of someone else's.

At least I have my health.  Which is good, because paying the medical costs for a single heart attack would leave me jobless, homeless, and right back where all of the experts and data insist I belong.

4 plus!?  My score is double the highest score they bothered to chart. With a score of 4 your odds of being an alcoholic are already 8 TIMES that of a person with a fairly regular childhood.  Were the results for 5-10 just too depressing to mention?

Earliest Memories.

I'm not sure how I am supposed to organize all of this stuff.  Organization was never my strong suit.  Perhaps it is the natural consequence of learning young that every day brings only chaos.  Infinite permutations, all of them bad.  A continuous triage -- stop the bleeding and brace for whatever is next.

Or perhaps I am just disorganized.

In computers, there are two kinds of memory access:

Sequential Access in which the data must be read in order from start to finish (tape drives, for example), and Random Access in which data may be read in any order without penalty.  This is where the term 'Random Access Memory' or 'RAM' comes from.  Of course, the reads aren't really random.  It would have been more accurate to describe such memory as Arbitrary Access, but RAM is a lot catchier than AAM, and technical righteousness is always going to take a backseat to marketing.

Human memory, on the other hand, is very random.  Constantly accessing information you weren't even looking for.  Memories bubble to the forefront of your thoughts entirely out of sequence.  It is for this reason that I will almost certainly be bouncing back and forth between timeframes.  That said, I am going to piece together the bits I can remember from before the time my first brother was born.

I was born in Seattle.  Even from a very young age I remember that my family was struggling, economically.  This was largely because my dad preferred not to work.

My father is a genius, and an artist;  A natural with computers and structured logic in a time when it was far less common than it is now.  He is brilliant as a musician and as a conversationalist.  As is so often the case, such gifts come at a price.  My father is also a lazy man with no ambition.  It was almost as if he was afraid to achieve his potential.  Worst of all, it was never in his heart to pay attention to his children.  As the eldest, I did receive more than my fair share of what little attention he doled out.  That said, if I never make the effort to contact my father, I will never see or hear from him again.  Being the favorite simply means that he is less resistant to spending time with me when I do call.  Lest you think I am exaggerating, I have seen my father exactly 3 times since the age of 21.  In each instance, I initiated that contact.  I am nearly 40 now.

I spent a good portion of my life assuming that it was incumbent upon me to become sufficiently noteworthy.  I followed science and computers and delved into music in a big way.  In many ways I became my father, or my perception of him.  The last time I saw him, despite having not talked with him in over 10 years, I saw that he had purchased the exact same computer components and built the exact same computer that I built.  This isn't some prebuilt deal, but a built from scratch custom computer.  Our components were nearly identical.  Even after years of not seeing my father, I am so closely connected with his value system and his way of thinking that I come to the same conclusions an uncanny percentage of the time.

It worries me how closely I mirror his thought patterns, because I do not want to be this person.

Once I was old enough to understand that treatment was unequal between my brothers and I, it made me feel uncomfortable.  My brothers really needed that attention, and it struck me as unfair that I should get the attention instead.  I felt guilty for this, but also the pressure of having to live up to this increased expectation.  At a very young age, it was made clear to me by both of my parents that 'smart' is the thing I would need to be in order to be loved and praised.  In their defense, I don't believe that they realized they were sending this message, but it was the pattern which emerged.  They would brag to their friends about my high standardized testing scores.  It was clear that the only thing I could offer them was to always be smarter than the next kid.  It was a status I defended the way a slave in a pit might defend food from the dogs.  Being the smartest was survival.  The positive side of this was that I was naturally equipped to be inherently more intelligent than other children.  The scope of my vocabulary was often surprising to adults, and I had a natural drive for knowledge which placed me well ahead of my peers.

It didn't matter if I was, in fact, the smartest - only that I was overtly intelligent in a way that would cause people to assume I knew what I was talking about.  I learned to appear intelligent.  It was the first of many things I would learn to pretend to be.  Not that it was entirely an act.  I had prodigious capacity for learning.  But I think that capacity was driven, perhaps, by the pride my parents showed in me as I achieved more in school.  There was very little which they possessed for which they might experience pride.  Love being a limited commodity, I would need to be on my A game at all times.

The downside of accruing knowledge before humility is the tendency to become an insufferable know-it-all.  A trait that precisely no one likes in young children.  I was never well liked by my peers.  It didn't help that even as a very young child I was given to a saturnine bearing.  I was never a happy child, and I learned young that I would never get anything I wanted, no matter how minor.  In fact, expressing wants was largely discouraged in my home, aside from requests to be fed and watered.

The answer was always no.


If this paints an unkind picture of my parents, understand that we were very poor.


The first home I have any recollection of spending any real time in was in a housing project in Seattle called Rainier Vista.  In 2008, Rainier Valley accounted for nearly a quarter of the homicides in Seattle, but back in 1980, it was a legitimately scary place.

Seattle: even our ghettos are picturesque. 

Not that I realized it at the time.  As it was a ghetto, we were surrounded by black people.  But to us, this was normal.  Most of my friends in school were black, because I was one of very few white children going to that school.

I was too young to see the drugs, but the alcoholism was rampant.  One of my earliest memories is reading the word OLYMPIA off a can of beer.  I remember this because I had trouble with the "It's the Water", because it had been written in script on the can.

Cut me some slack, I was 3.

Looking back, it's hilarious to think of how very white I was.  I was raised in the LDS church which is already whiter than alabaster milktoast in Wyoming in the winter.  But I was also a bookish sort of kid who enjoyed throwing around my dictionary words.

We had cats.  Gory (short for mandragore) and Trilandria.  They had kittens.  Of all of those kittens I only remember Mandru.  He was with us the shortest time.  At 6 months he was put down for feline leukemia.  It was a difficult time for me, because he was the only cat who would be nice to me.

My first brother was born that summer.  I remember being at my maternal grandmother's home waiting for mother to come home with Leonard.  In the mind of a 3.5 year old, I was going to have someone to play with.  I didn't really understand the concept of infancy -- which is kind of funny when you consider how recently I had myself been an infant.

My maternal grandmother and her husband -- We'll call them Linda and Gene -- were a bit of work.  Mount St Helens erupted on their anniversary, which is effectively the least violent explosion ever to happen on their anniversary.  They were abusive and terrible people.  My grandmother once broke a cast iron fireplace poker over my mother's back.  On another occasion she threw a dinner glass at my mother's face which shattered, leaving glass permanently embedded in her face right next to her eye.  They were angry about everything and they swore at everything.  Looking back, it's all kind of lyrical.  I remember my grandmother yelling -- on a daily basis -- "SOOOOOOON OF A BITCH!   SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON OF A BITCH!"

I know you don't hear in your head what I hear in describing it, but imagine that it was loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear it.  Because that's how loud it was.  It didn't take an advanced intellect to determine that the best place to be was out of sight, so I spent most of my time engaged in away activities.  watching television downstairs in the split level, or wandering around outside.  I became a master of laying low and avoiding attention.

No child, and few adults possessed the constitution to withstand being the target of this yelling, and it was genuinely terrifying.  These were people fueled by hate.  Gene remains the archetype for evil in my mind.  I think I may only have ever seen him smile as an act of cruelty or mockery.

My real maternal grandfather killed himself before I was born, and I'm sure that had a tremendous impact on my mother.  But nothing like the constant physical, psychological, verbal, and emotional abuse that she experienced at the hands of my grandmother and her husband.  For every negative thing I will say about my mother, it is to her greatest credit that she did not revisit this violence on us kids.  Few are able to break that cycle so abruptly.

My grandmother's house was decorated with the things one collected in the '70s when they wanted to show everyone else that they were walking with the LORD.  A florid and baroquely framed "footsteps" poster, and a cast metal prayer hands sculpture.  A painting of waves, and a painting with the rays of light peering through the clouds like streamers from heaven.  On Sundays Linda would watch Jimmy Swaggart or some other high end television huckster.  She was the just the kind of simpleminded believer who lived in a world where Power Hour miracles are a real thing.  The sort of person a travelling jesus revival con man would look for.

She was a true believer.

Which is what makes it amazing to me:  If you truly believed in Jesus, and believed in the teachings of the bible -- if you believed that he was watching you at all times -- How could you possible go through life with such a hateful demeanor?  She knew the fury of god, yes.  But she knew nothing of compassion, or mercy, or kindness.  She knew nothing of the love in one's heart for their neighbor.

I believe that she was the sort of person who was so busy in trying to prove to god that she is on his side that she forgot to learn any of the lessons that went with the story.  The sort of person who would have stepped on a beggar and knocked a pregnant woman out of her way to press to the front of the crowd and ask Jesus how she might serve him.  It's not that she was a big bible thumper.  She simply wore those beliefs on the occasion it would be seen.  She was a Wal-Mart American before there was such a thing as Wal-Mart.

My mother had always hoped to win her mother's love.  And in her way, my grandmother did love my mother.  There was frequently tension between my grandmother and her husband because of the money she would spend on clothes or groceries for us kids.  Every dollar was a leash that meant my mother would have to sit quietly and endure the beratement that went with it.  It was the best our mother could do to make sure we had shoes, and coats.

And we never once went without shoes, or coats.

The day my brother was born marked the end of my first extended stay with my maternal grandmother.

Introduction

Anamnesis
n.The recollection or remembrance of the past; reminiscence.

The past is a curious thing.


We are, all of us, the sum of our experiences.  Not to say that one's free will is nullified by the chains of the personal history, but that our perceptions of the present are forged, by necessity, from that which has come before.

The bizarre nature of your past is revealed when you consider that it affects your present in two ways.

Every moment of your past was once your present.  Frame by frame, hurtling into the future, you lived each of those moments.  An unbroken chain of 'nows' leading to the now you now call now.  In all that time, you acted, and were acted upon - for better or for ill.  Each experience; each lesson; every love; each hour frittered away in idleness bringing you to this point in what will soon be history.  The past you lived worked on you like a sculptor on copper.  Hundreds of thousands of hammer blows, each shaping you, just a little.

But there is a second past which influences us just as much - if not more - than the past we lived through.  This is the past as we remember it.  The past we experienced made countless changes to us along the way - many of those experiences lost to the river of forgotten things.  We use the past as we remember it to justify the persons we become, but these justifications are frequently ignorant of the innumerable formative experiences lost to the fog of time.  However, our perceived memory is not merely a passive rationalization.  It is the imperfect recollection from which we draw our conclusions about new situations, people, and things.  It is the source of our identity.


You are what you remember yourself to be.


The purpose of this blog is to investigate the narrative of my own past - Those memories I've allowed to lapse into dereliction for lack of recall - to address the duality of my own past and bring more of my experienced past into the realm of past remembered.  I endeavor in this task, even knowing aforehand that my recollections will by the nature of memory be imperfect.  I suppose flawed knowledge is better than no knowledge at all.

Mine was not a happy childhood.  Indeed, I have never been a happy adult.  I suspect that the need to excavate the past would be obviated by a deep sense of well-being in the present.  Rarely, I have recounted tales from my childhood to others.  More often than not, the reaction was something along the lines of "Wow, you've had it pretty rough."


I wouldn't know.


Mine is the only childhood I've ever known.  It all seemed normal at the time.  By no measure was my childhood the worst, but each chapter I view afresh with adult eyes only reveals it to be much worse than I originally understood.  The abuses of my childhood were different in many ways from the anticipated norms.  I was rarely struck, and was usually fed.  What might classify as sexual abuse was oblique, and never the direct sort of thing one envisions when thinking of sexual abuse.

I am not writing in the hopes of eliciting pity or securing a mantle of victimhood.  I don't need anyone to feel sorry for me.  There is entirely too much of that in this world.  We come from a culture where it is not acceptable for a 38 year old man such as myself to admit the weight of his past.  As were many others born in the '70s I was raised with the belief that any perceived weakness in a man made him a 'faggot'.  I knew that before I had any idea what the word 'faggot' was referencing - only that there was no more contemptible designation to which one might aspire.  Ironically, it is still a common insult to throw around today - largely by those on the more radical fringes of the left.  The words have changed but they will assure you that "homophobes are gay," because calling a white Republican a fag is a victory for tolerance.

Time moved on, and I've let go of the hurtful vernacular of my youth.  We try to pretend that such attitudes are ancient history, but much of it has simply been re-worded and redirected.  I don't understand what the world has become sometimes, and the alleged face of progress has become disappointingly regressive.  It saddens me, because until very recently I was on their side.


The problem is, no one is on my side.


As a white middle-aged male in America, it is not only largely assumed that I am the beneficiary of some tremendous privilege, but that I am somehow personally responsible for every injustice in the history of mankind.  Even bringing up that my past enjoys its own unique set of abuses and injustices is an affront to the world at large.  "HA!  You've experienced abuse and injustice?  Try being a woman / LGBT / African American!"

You're right.  I am none of those people.  And all of them have legitimate grievances which must be addressed.  But I don't need to be the 'most abused' to have been abused.  Inequality exists for men, as well.  We are expected to weather all things unfazed.  But we are human, just like the other half of the world.  There is a price for uninterrupted stoicism, and we cannot begin to fathom the depths of it because the societal pressure to 'man up' is absolute.  The ultimate goal of this blog is to provide the voice of an adult male who came from a background of extreme poverty and abuse.  It is my hope that others like me will see that they are not alone.

More than any of that, it is my hope that I can reconstruct the missing bits of my childhood.  Not all of this is going to be about the various ways my life sucks.  Much of it is just going to be an attempt to know a past that I've lost.