I was "raised" by alcoholic parents, a manipulative grandmother, other uninvolved adults & one well meaning, slightly older sister. The problem with this is that while my sister managed my younger brothers & myself the best she could, she was a kid herself. My brothers & myself were just short of feral. We came in when we were hungry & we came in to sleep. We weren't really taught to do much at all.
Watching my brothers & me get along was sort of like watching a mixed-age litter of kittens. At times we could get along (usually only if mutual benefit was assured), but most often we kept our distance from each other. When forced to be near each other, the fight was inevitable.
Concepts like responsibility, goals or just about anything social were lost to us. We were the lords of our own fortunes, no matter how meager they may have been. We were not about to abide anyone telling us how to act or what to do. Eventually we started to realize that we were very different from the others. We resented that difference & the others for being different.
We became mercenary, oddly charismatic & manipulative. Some might say we were well our ways to becoming sociopaths. Not all people who have such persuasions are criminal, most are just anti-social. They make great business men, politicians & lawyers. If we wanted something, we would find a way to get & it was seldom the conventional way of doing so. I went to college, even got a Ph.D., but it wasn't for the right reasons. I didn't go there to learn or even to improve my life. I went to college because I had absolutely no other place to go. At college I could pass, blend even thrive, but it was still just a con.
In my late late thirties, my father showed back up. I had not spoken to him sense I was sixteen. It was not an amicable departure. By this time I was + & on disability. He tried to enter my brothers lives only to find them still mostly beastly. There had been run-ins with the law & jail for both of them, prison for one. They couldn't hold jobs, they couldn't maintain relationships & mostly didn't care about those things. This baffled my father.
He constantly talks about how my brothers don't do this or haven't done that. He doesn't like anything about their lives & acts like they should know better. I finally had it & told him that no one had ever taught us to do any of that crap. No one taught me how to cook, do laundry or even how to shave. I learned all of that on my own often through disastrous trial & error. I didn't get my driver's license until I was twenty-six. I'd drove since I was twelve, but I didn't have a license. Check books, running a household, shopping & a host of other things most people's families teach them were mine fields of experimentation for me. Yet still my father acts like my brothers & me had some type of instruction manual for life that should've taught us everything we needed to know if we'd just bothered to read the damn thing.
I would've been ecstatic if I'd found an instruction manual. I went through life like a stray cat, not sure to purr for attention or attack the person trying to get too close. My brothers & me are territorial, defensive & quick to over react. If something threatens you, clobber it, so it can never do it again. We pace, we snarl & we avoid most unpleasant situations no matter what the potential outcome.
I've been more fortunate than my brothers on this matter. I've learned to blend better & at least act like I care about some of the social norms & niceties, but I really don't buy any of it. I can maintain until my habits & rituals are through out of whack. I realize that reality is fragile & things constantly threaten all paradigms. Let something like a frozen pipe or a screwed up car come along & for a bit I'd rather just bite something than deal with anything.
Eventually I calm down & start building back up the mask of the socially well adjusted individual. When I was younger I used to think everyone was like me & they were just faking it. Later I decided, no it's just me & those people raised like me. I'm no longer that certain. Maybe were all just violent animals hiding under the facsimile of the well socialized member of society? Watch any disaster movie, when the people are stranded or threatened, the social mores & norms go the way of the do-do bird. Sure some of the "good" guys maintain their programming, but just barely. And, that's only so the writers could make it looks like the just, socially entrenched individuals are somehow more moral & sanctified than those who aren't.
We are all just animals agreeing to maintain an illusion of civility, but let something become too much of a threat or present too tempting of an opportunity & that beast lying underneath will rip back into reality & do what it thinks needs to be done. We are animals, social, sometimes civil animals, but animals all the same. Sometimes animals bite.
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