emotional self-examination and asperger's and revised standard version and memorization

1. Deep Memories. The first thought that almost invariably joins me in the morning is that I lived a life devoid of choice as a child. This, of course, is my memory of things; others who were calibrating things as observers or even others intimately involved with my past (i.e., parents) might disagree. But this is a strong and ever-present reality to me. I grew up as the second of four boys, and I think my parents felt that we boys needed to be controlled more than anything else. But control was not really established through elaborate systems of rewards and punishments; it was achieved primarily through tasks and activities. I guess this would be a sort of "channeling" of energy. So, by age 8, I had to take piano lessons, by age 10 I had to have a paper route, at age 12 I had to take ballroom dancing, and I had to participate in a number of sports, school activities and church. I had to eat what was prepared for dinner, and I had to like it. I had to excel in math. I even had to have hobbies that were selected for me--stamp collecting and, to a lesser extent, coin collecting. Never was there the sense that I had a choice among options. I have no memory of my parents/mother ever saying to me, "Bill, you can do this or that or something of your own choosing." This, then, is my memory, and I think about it every day. The feeling of not having a choice and, therefore, not developing an array of preferences or even the ability to discern differences between things according to my pleasure is ever before me. After reading this essay, my mother will no doubt call and explain to me that I really did have choices. She has been missing the point for more than 50 years.

2. Marriage Realities. I brought my lack of ability to express preference into marriage. In fact, now that I think about my past, I conclude that I got married primarily because I thought I should rather than that I had explored my "options" among girls/women along the way. I loved my girl-friend/wife, and was happy to be married to her for many years; but I didn't explore the way that lack of expressed preference might affect the way I approached an intimate relationship. Marriage brought other things in its wake, however, among which were certain spoken (or unspoken) rules about how we would live together. One of the most traumatic, the effect of which only dawned on me several years later, was the "no yell" rule. It was a rule that we couldn't raise our voices. Why not? Because, at least in my memory, my wife didn't want us to do so. "Calm" was the word. "Controlled" was the reality. And this was overlaid by a useless layer of Evangelical garbage to the effect that if God was really guiding your life and that of your wife, you would naturally have God as # 1, and since God is # 1 for both people, God couldn't be in conflict with God. Such are the foolish vagaries of ideological thinking.

The effect of this rule, I believe, was a further dissociation of emotions from life. In my family of origin, I had no idea what a preference was; in my married life I had no ability to express strong emotion. Every morning when I wake up, then, in 2006, I think of these two realities. I accept them as "givens," which means that I think of them as unchanging realities from the past. They are as real to me as if I had lost a parent at age 10 had suffered a debilitating injury/disease. They are simply there.

But, because I am a child of the 1990s as well as the 1960s, I believe to a certain extent in "win-win" situations, though not in the Stanley Cup Finals. That is, I think that the past can be an asset rather than a debility and that we see the past through new lenses as time goes on. Thus, I admit that the past has a certain plasticity to it, thanks to the power of interpretation, but these are the events and some interpretations that I draw from them.

A Digression

Because of these two realities, I have been reluctant (or unable) over the years to identify and express my preferences. But, as a friend tells me, every day we express preferences all the time. The mere fact that I decided to live in a certain place or do a certain job, pursue a career or activities meant that I expressed preferences. Fair enough. But I also remember being too solicitous of what others thought when I did express preferences, and I simply changed my behavior because of what they said. One example will suffice. When I was 19, I began memorizing the Bible with abandon. It was a sort of competition (with myself) and an act of spiritual desire because by doing so I hoped to internalize the very words of God. I figured that if I did so I would somehow be closer to God, more able to discern His will, more able to live a life pleasing to Him and more likely to achieve my "success"--whatever that meant at the time (and I still think of that on a daily basis, too).

So, I memorized the Book of James, and then began in earnest on the Book of Proverbs in Fall 1971. I would memorize several verses a day, reciting them in my mind as I was walking across campus or doing almost anything. There was a lightness in my step as I did so. I still recall myself getting the precise words (of the Revised Standard Version--I was not into multi-lingual memorization at the time) straight. But then I told some friends about it. They stared at me with a sort of horrified look in their eyes. "You can't do that," they said. "It will take you too long, you will be wasting time, and ultimately you can just look it up when you need the right verse, anyway." And so, I stopped memorizing. I figured that they must be right, and so I decided to give up my preference because it must be not a good preference since my friends didn't like it.

Conclusion

Well, these are only a few thoughts that get me going in the morning. I have many others, but I don't feel like writing about them today. Maybe tomorrow...especially the thought of my "Asperger's like" condition, which I am just discovering in myself. I wish you well in your emotional self-evaluation.

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