Just got home from an exam and was thinking about things over.
Objectively speaking, my childhood geared me up to be a very competent adult. I've found my passions in life, know what I want to do, my direction is clear as day and that's a blessing. But I can't help but feel so much of it was lost to time. I had a small group of friends when I was a kid but I never did much with them. That's a regret I have. My dad was one of the few who treated me like a human being but he was a workaholic who I didn't get to see much of. My mother's got OCD so she's easy to set off. My sister was way too young to talk about anything with, and my older brother wanted nothing to do with me.
I tried clinging onto extended family, adolescent cousins and my older brother, but they always saw me as a hanger-on and a burden. So I pretty much had nothing save for video games and the Internet. I loved going on old random Web 1.0 sites, that's where I found my love for languages and history. I liked playing stuff like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM 1 and 2 as a kid. In fact, DOOM's basically followed me my entire life even to this day.
It's often times that people love old video games not only for themselves but also their experiences associated with them. They associate the games they played with friends, maybe even a girlfriend/boyfriend. It's an artifact of a bygone time that brings longing. That isn't the case with me, or at least not quite. I had nothing else. I'm 20 years old, have no friends, no driver's license, and my entire social circle is made up of close family members.
It isn't because I'm overly shy or misanthropic, people are nice to me generally. I just feel a weird sense of unease speaking to people. I couldn't explain it otherwise, I use the term "to see the cyborg in someone" to refer to that.
Speaking of, and I hope this doesn't come across as narcissistic, but people tell me I'm super smart. My parents always saw me as a wunderkind, someone beyond his years, and in school I was put in the gifted class. A girl in my class even once told my mom I'm the most intelligent person she'd ever met.
I don't think I'm smart though, more of a savant (which is what my therapist described me as). Are there things I'm good at? Sure. But the few faculties where I exceed expectation are balanced out by a complete lack of social, emotional and spatial intelligence. Recently learned from my therapist that I have Asperger's syndrome, which makes a lot of sense to me now. In fact, I like this position. Being a "genius" would make me have to measure up to some arbitrary convention of what a "genius" is.
