Today was amazing. I’ve felt this way after a very, very long time, and I’m loving it. I’m writing this (yes, of the pencil and paper kinds) at a café over my second (extremely large) glass of hot chocolate. Mmmm.. chocolate. I’ve spent most of my evening here. No mucking around with broken meshes, no classes, no coding, no SGI annoyances, no homework, no music, no reading, no talking, no writing, no cute little kiddies running around, … no nothing.
Just me, thinking. Me, my pencil, and bits of scrap paper. Made some leaps in thought and it feels awesome. Finally.
Which now leads me to a very scary thought. Self sufficiency. My apparently apparent self sufficiency to be more precise. Why is it that some people are quite happy being all alone and fully capable of keeping themselves entertained/intellectually engaged/sane and productive and so on while there are others who’re in constant need of company/someone to talk to/spend their time with and that sort of thing?
I am not entirely sure if this is a sort of thing that people are born with, or whether it’s their life circumstance that drives them to behave in a certain manner. As with everything else, I am sure it is a linear combination of the two. But I think, for me anyway, it started out with me not having too much of a choice, and being forced to “evolve to handle it” strengthened some inherent ability to keep myself entertained.
For whatever reasons, when I was a kid of <insert insanely teeny age here>, I lived in this home in an area that didn’t have anybody else in my age group to play with. I had a bunch of toys, a TV I couldn’t understand, a mom, and me. I dealt with it the way I knew how. Contrary to the “awww, poor baby” tone I’m trying to pull off, this had some odd advantages that had begun to crop up even at that time. Stuff I noticed, and still remember. I had gotten into attempting to make stuff. Crafts and that sort of thing, within the bounds of my age limited dexterity.
There was this very nice teacher in pre kindergarten, whose name I obviously don’t remember, but her face I do. (I think I last met her when in fifth grade, when she comes up and goes, loosely paraphrased, “So young man, does your handwriting still suck?” Her only peek into my handwriting previously being those pre alphabet squiggles we did as kiddies.) We had some time to play with clay. The usual kiddies were doing usual kiddy things. Attempting to eat the clay, breaking it up into bits and throwing it all over the place, or struggling to roll it into a small (highly non spherical) ball.
I made her a (blue) necklace with a flattened yellow disc functioning as some sort of medallion. Sure, it broke as she was thanking me and attempting to wear it, (you have no idea how hard it is to control your hands to do what you want them to do when you’re 2–3) but it was the thought that, I think, counted. I was thinking about stuff. I was planning, I was practicing, I was trying to create. I’d begun losing the ability to say, fight with another kid over a crayon, or feel sad that someone didn’t want me as their friend.
Yes, things (my “social setup”) soon got better as I was just a little bit older. But by then the damage, and I’ll call it influence, had left its mark. I had realized I was capable of being perfectly normal all alone. I’d begun to do, and still do, different things to keep me occupied. And alone.
Learning multiple instruments, singing, dabbling in arts, craft and photography, baking, composing, a couple of PhDs, … maintaining a fairly useless journal? It is quite obvious what is going on here.
Of course, none of this makes too much sense without getting into why this topic scared me.
How can someone who’s in a similar state ever unequivocally prove to someone else they need them to be happy? I know for a fact, “Yes, I am quite happy alone, but I know I will be happier with you” doesn’t cut it. But then again, why do they have to? Might not someone exist for them who gets this without proof?