Categories: uncategorized
Date: 29 August 2007 11:51:16
I knew it wasn't me.
Apart from that certainty I don't remember much. We were in the playground and being called back into class. The teacher stopped us at the steps and wouldn't let us further until she had had an apology from the person who said something very rude about her. So we all stopped and looked around with that growing sense of fear-excitement-anticipation as we waited for the culprit to give themselves up and as we increasingly admired their courage at holding out for so long. Gradually the admiration became mixed with frustration - waiting isn't, after all, a lot of fun. What I particularly don't remember is how it became clear to me that I was the culprit. Maybe the teacher was forced, after waiting so long, to give enough clues away for me to realize what/who she was talking about. Maybe the waiting gave me enough opportunity to remember what had happened previously and to stumble upon my memory of the `crime'. But that suggests that I would have had some awareness that I had committed a crime and I know I had no such awareness. I know that because that's become such a common feeling since - the feeling that I've done nothing wrong in my eyes but that something I've done has been unacceptable to the people around me. And I suppose what is so unpleasant about it isn't the sense of being in the wrong, at least not in the precise sense of having done something bad. I can live with that sense. No, what is really unpleasant is the sense of being so out of tune with other people that what is acceptable to me is clearly not acceptable to others. The realization that, yet again, I can't trust my own perceptions - they're wrong - and I have to scrutinise every one of my acts and options from the point of view of how everyone else might see it. It's the effort involved in moving from my own point of view to what I guess might be other people's point of view. Experience has taught me there can be a long distance between my view and others' so it's a long journey, requiring huge feats of imagination. At the end of the day I suppose it's just hard work, and a pain knowing that that effort should be undertaken for every little thing I consider doing.
At times I've pondered the causes of this and realized that my out-of-tune perceptions can be largely attributed to my parents. On that occasion in particular I would have insulted the teacher because my family's natural language is insults. I was brought up not to exchange pleasantries but to exchange insults. I suppose that was my parents' idea of humour. And I suppose that experience in the playground was an early signal as to how badly this `humour' would set me up for getting on with people in real life. So eventually I learnt to work hard at suppressing the natural (or perhaps `nurtural' would be the better word) tendencies to insult, at least to direct the insults at myself - self-deprecation being a much more acceptable type of humour than insults are. Unfortunately, as life goes on, I found myself getting to know some people well enough to feel able to indulge in the odd insult-as-humour. And then I seemed to spend more and more of my time with people I knew very well and less with people I didn't know so well. Leaving me feeling more often able to indulge in the odd insult. And so I can see the pattern continuing to the point that, before Cambuslang gets to the age I was in that playground, my natural language will again be insults, thus setting him up perfectly to be in exactly the same sorry position I was all those years ago. That's progress folks.