Before you read this post, I highly recommend that you read “Why Nerds Are Unpopular” by Paul Graham.

On top of Graham’s assertion that most modern American high schools socially function like prisons (which I can attest to as scarily accurate), there’s another level of shunning that goes on for an outcast such as myself.

We don’t even get the nerd association, as low down in the hierarchy as they are. We’re simply deemed freakish outsiders, too strange to even belong with lowly nerds.

Thankfully enough, this never really bothered me, although I was acutely aware of my outsider status. I was occasionally made fun of and completely isolated, but I didn’t really want to join in any reindeer games regardless.

My complete disinterest in bonding with adolescent assholes, I think, is what saved me, even though I was an abused child. Had I really cared what my peers though of me, I would probably have killed myself.

Part of that isolation was earlier enforced by my mother. I’ve talked before about the physical abuse, cultural coercion and emotional incest I was subjected to from my father. What I haven’t really discussed was the emotional neglect, occassional physical abuse, and gaslighting I was subjected to by my mother.

My mother was, and is (How can I put this?), kind of fake. She could give people, besides my siblings and I, the most insincere smiles and syrupy pleasantries while hiding her seething dissatisfaction with us from them. I don’t know where she got that from (probably disguising her own abusive upbringing), but it left me with a severe distaste for pretense in any fashion.

Another weird thing she used to do to me as a prepubescent is send me to school with developmentally disabled children. I have no idea why she thought that was appropriate, but this is a thing she did to me repeatedly. I am not developmentally disabled. I may have not been the extroverted child she hoped for, but introversion is not a disability.

Even when I was older, she would often take us as a family to stay in institutes devoted to the care of the developmentally disabled. Also, she would often force us kids to interact with our disabled relatives, as if we had something in common. It wasn’t something she asked of me or solicited my opinion about. She just did it occasionally, like a forced trip to a human zoo. It always felt offensive to me, like she didn’t think those individuals deserved their own privacy or that I was one of them.

One of the things my brother and I used to do is incessantly rock ourselves back and forth alone in our shared room. I now know that this is often a sign of emotional neglect in children. So, yeah, even though she did many things right as a single mother, even giving her the benefit of the doubt, she still kind of sucked in other essential areas. She’s not alone in that failure. My father also failed to step in as a healthy parent. Regardless, even though some of us our introverted, none of us are disabled.

My weirdness was and is my near complete disinterest in conventional conformity. It wasn’t something she had to fix or distance herself from.