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.