I dwell too much on the past. I’m optimistic about the future, but I am not a futurist.* I would like to be more of one, but it’s hard when the past is so heavy and every time you try, some new medical development comes along to shake up plans and expectations.
I think sometimes that this state of being has hindered my development as a person. A lot of my biggest medical milestones – none of them good – happened during the years when most people are developing their socially personalities.
From ages five to seven, when my independence was supposed to be reaching beyond my family to make friends, I was wholly dependent on them because I was recovering from meningitis. Physically, I couldn’t approach anyone, environmentally, I wasn’t in school or camp for six months, and, when I did go back, I was in a wheelchair. Not exactly independence-nurturing circumstances.
Between ages 12 and 14, when most kids are making the transition between childhood and adulthood, I was experiencing pre-diagnosis/honeymoon stage and diagnosis of diabetes. I was too tired to do anything but function. After that, I didn’t develop my adult personality, I got stuck in the rebellion stage of adolescence. For a long time. I didn’t join my peers at parties. I developed social anxiety. I didn’t date – I could have, but I was too closed to read the more subtle social cues, and too scared of anything that would upset my flawed illusion of control.
Between those two periods of limbo, while I waited for some kind of new normal to manifest, I was socially frozen. I would guess, between the two, I ended up behind my peers by about 10 years.
I would also guess that this has contributed to my lack of desire for children, the “I don’t wanna” part of my issues with authority, and my ability to hold on to childlike. Not childish. Stages of my childhood may have been frozen, but it was also plundered of innocence and security, so childish went the way of all things in the opposite direction – long before it should have. Hence, my inability to enjoy feature films starring sketch comics. At all.
But childlike. That’s something different. Something good. Jaded as I have become, I still experience curiosity and wonder and joy feeling the vastness of space and the strangeness of otherworldly animals that live in the ocean. The slow fury of volcanoes and sinuousness of dance performances. A childhood song given an electronic overhaul. Rough and striated rock formations and food created to feed something beyond the stomach. I absolutely love an angry ocean.
It's all observational, of course. I still hug cynicism to my breast like it’s Linus’s security blanket. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon. And I am not saying I am unique in this. Plenty of people experience altered social development on timelines affected by circumstance. But this is me, and holding on to childlike provides relief from the constant heaviness of so much else I shoulder as a patient.
I hope I never lose it.
*As in, Merriam-Webster’s “concern with events and trends of the future, or which anticipate the future.” Not the early 20th century movement that rejected traditional artistic approaches.