Dear Kalap,

It’s been almost twenty years since we last saw each other, I think.

I want to apologize for my actions on the playground that day. I also want to tell you a bit about what was going on for me.

It’s not to excuse what I did, but perhaps the perspective into my life will help you in some way.

On the surface, the same racist assholes who were teasing you were asking me, when you weren’t around, “Why are you friends with Kalap?”

The right answer–the assertive answer–would be, among others: “Because he doesn’t ask me why I’m friends with people that I like.”

However, as you well know, I did not give the right answer. I hunkered down, I tried to shrink into myself, hoping they would go away, but they never did.

As a test of friendship, I did fail you on that day; in my defense, however, I was equipped against a successful friendship.

My parents had recently divorced, and my father’s advice about bullies was something like, “Don’t let them get to you,” which is just about the same as saying to somebody standing in the rain, “Don’t get wet,” while refusing to let them stand under your umbrella.

I had no other friends to talk to about it… and I don’t think I talked to you, either. At the very least, I don’t remember talking to you about it at all.

So indeed, I did fail that test… but the test of integrity and loyalty was so incredibly difficult, it probably would have been some sort of small miracle if I had passed.

I hope that this brings you some clarity about what happened almost twenty years ago. I hope it brings a little peace, and perhaps some relief, if even but a small bit.

I cannot repair the damage, it is too long gone. I can only offer a salve to soften the scar.

All the best,

James Alexander Pyrich

I used to post a lot more on my blog about my childhood and my immediate family… and then, I’m totally fogging on this, but I stopped posting about that, and… well, I barely posted anything at all after that.

I would rarely get any responses to my blog posts, but when I did, they would be one of two kinds:

• praise
• attack

Of those that praised me, it was often private, sometimes public, and they would often express appreciation or gratitude at my willingness to post about such difficult topics. I would be praised for my openness, my courage, my vulnerability, my honesty…

Of those that attacked me–and there were more of these, though not as many as others receive–it was far more often private, rarely public… and I would be called cowardly, weak, childish, spineless, unforgiving, capricious, immature, selfish, judgmental…

The members of my family fell squarely into the second camp. In their attacks, they also called me crazy, said I was lying and making things up, making matters worse than they were, holding on to the past…

But I have never struck a child–at least not since I myself was a child.
I have never yelled at a child and frightened them past the point of tears.
I have never forced a child to eat when he wasn’t hungry and refused to feed him when he was.
I have never refused to let a child use the bathroom and then forced him to sit in his own urine for lord knows how long, and then beat him afterwards for wetting himself.
I have never refused to seek medical attention for a child when he was sick or in pain.
I have never yelled at a child for getting lost.
I have never yelled at a child for not doing schoolwork.
I have never deliberately and systematically mutilated a child.
I have never used a child to talk about my own adult issues.
I have never yelled at or beaten a child for urinating in his bed.

I have been brutal to myself–but I never would have been so if I had not experienced the above.

All I did was talk about it… and I only did that when those same family members that are now attacking me refused to talk about it with me.

Of course… for them to treat me with the respect I deserved so very many years ago now would be a sick and sad sort of joke, a farce… because now that they can’t really hurt me anymore, but that I can hurt them… now they’re all about the tolerance and forgiveness.

Now that I have power… they counsel caution and restraint.

Now that I can hurt them…

“Where was your fucking tolerance when I wet the bed?”
“Where was your fucking restraint when I brought home those teachers’ notes?”

Compared to what?

What am I doing that is so horribly egregious compared to what they did?

Compared to WHAT?

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22.8M 33:13

One caveat, upon relistening–when I say that, as a teenager, “I” did something with regards to capitulating, I mean that it was my unconscious that did it; it wasn’t something I decided to do consciously.

It just occurred to me that people who try to hide their feelings are actually pretty creepy.

And I would include myself in this category for the moment, but not because I feel creepy so much as what it must be like for others to encounter it. What’s going on when i’m trying to hide my feelings?

Obviously, as a kid, I had to do this in order to avoid getting assaulted… but just the general principle where you feel like you have to hide your feelings…

And the problem isn’t that you decide upon “appropriate” displays of emotion, I don’t think… it’s that when you get to the point of hiding your emotions from others, they still find a way to come out, to manifest themselves.

This occurred to me when i got a reply to an email this morning and I don’t think I could really say what it was the sender of this email was feeling.

In any case, I think back to when I was a kid… and my father was a big “fan” of hiding his feelings until they spilled over as rage. I’m not saying it was something he enjoyed but it was certainly something that worked for him, something that was better for him than facing whatever feelings he was bottling in.

Oh and of course… my mother’s the same way, really. She doesn’t express nor explore her feelings but tries to hide them until she also spills over with rage.

So, in my experience, if somebody is hiding their feelings from themselves, they’re actually quite dangerous… or, at the very least, unstable.

And of course… the more access I have to my emotions, the more of a threat I become to my parents, even as a little kid. Not that I had any means at my disposal to threaten them but my raw emotional experiences threatened their tenuous grasp on the lid that bottled their own feelings of pain, anger, fear, and sadness. So… they attacked me for it.

I’ve been noticing more lately, in slight degrees, just how other people hide their feelings… and I’m starting to see it within myself.

Memory from age 5 or 6:

Seems that it takes place at the elementary school I attended in Totowa, NJ. There was a girl, I think her name was Laura. I can’t remember if she was older or younger than me, but I remember that we enjoyed playing together.

Then, one day we were separated forcibly. Two adults were dragging her away, and we were both in tears. I can’t remember if it was because she was moving somewhere or if it was because we weren’t allowed to play with each other anymore… but I remember it being very sad.

More than that, of course, is that I don’t remember anybody ever taking the time to talk to me about how I felt. I don’t remember if anybody was restraining me or who it would have been; it could have been my parents. Whoever it was, they didn’t take a moment to talk to me about how my feelings.

Memory from first grade:

I was teased a LOT in school. Like, every day on the playground, and oftentimes in the classroom. My father and the teachers and the counselors would basically imply that I was bringing the teasing upon myself, but fuck them all–nobody was bothering to protect me from these other children.

One day, the teasing during lunchtime recess was so bad that I refused to come inside after recess was over. I was sitting on the blacktop, right next to the grass with my back to Peterson Road, my arms wrapped around my knees, just crying. The teacher was yelling at me to come inside, but I still stayed outside.

Finally, she walked out of the classroom, picked me up, and brought me inside. I’m pretty sure that I would have spent the rest of the day (at least!) just staring at my desk.

I think I get why the teacher did what she did–she felt an obligation to keep order in the classroom, and would have been held responsible for my safety if something were to happen to me. Thus, she felt a lot of anxiety. Instead of examining her anxiety, however, she decided to humiliate me. She never, ever spoke about the incident with me, never talked with me about how the other children treated me, nor did she ever approach my parents with concerns other than “Jimmy doesn’t play well with the other children” (which is a way of framing me as the problem, not the system).

I know there’s more to dig out of these memories. I will say that these are very sad memories, and very painful memories. They’re mere reflections of my home life at the time, of course, which I consider a psychic wasteland full of powerful predators.

Thanks for reading.

There’s been an idea brewing in my mind for a few days now regarding my work performance and level of satisfaction.

I do computer programming for a living. I really do love programming computers–it’s something I’ll do for free! It’s especially enjoyable and satisfying when I get into The Zone and can produce consistently high quality work at a pace that consistently surprises other people who have not yet experienced this effect.

However, the other side of The Zone is The Crash. I’m not emotionally depressed during The Crash (at least, certainly not in the way that I’ve experienced depression in the past), but I am largely unmotivated and find it difficult to do even the more simple coding tasks. During The Crash, I will write perhaps 10-100 lines of code in a full 8-hour day whereas during The Zone, it is possible to watch the product unfold before your eyes at times.

At first, I was thinking that these peaks and valleys were a problem in and of themselves! That is, I get into The Zone and I’m amazingly productive, but what follows–what ALWAYS follows–is The Crash, which can last for a week or longer at times. This induces quite a lot of anxiety, because I feel a compulsion to do the work regardless of whether or not I feel productive, much less whether I’m invested in the larger picture. In fact, the last project I had had a deadline that was quickly approaching whilst I stared at my screen. I felt more and more anxiety, because there was work that “I needed to do” but I seemed incapable of doing any of it. Finally (and this is part of the key), I would much rather inform a mafioso about the disrepute of his mother than I would want go to my boss to tell him or her that I am not able to work today.

Perhaps this is a tad imbalanced?

I was thinking that I would approach my boss and ask about managing my work patterns so that I could increase my average productivity by smoothing out the peaks and the valleys. As with all unexamined theories, it sounded good until I brought it before somebody with greater experience and insight than I!

What I got out of that was that my productivity patterns aren’t something that need to be changed, necessarily. Just as an athlete finds The Zone physically, so does a programmer find The Zone mentally. But it is not something that is under one’s control. One can certainly prepare for it and, over time, can make increasingly better use of it, but it no more is accessible through a conscious switch anymore than whether you feel hungry or not.

The problem isn’t The Zone. The problem is my anxiety about completing projects. It’s this anxiety which drives me to burn through as much as I possibly can while I am in The Zone. This is why The Crash can last for up to a week or more at times.

What I don’t do at work is manage the expectations of others. I haven’t tried to communicate with my bosses about my natural productivity cycle. What ends up happening is that they see the burst of productivity while I am in The Zone and begin to set their schedules based on that level of production. (This has already begun to happen.) If they understand that the productivity while I am in The Zone comes at a natural cost, they haven’t bothered to work that into their time estimates.

This goes back to my awful experience as a child where negotiation was absolutely impossible. My father would demand a task and if the task wasn’t done when he asked, how he liked it, and as fast as he liked it, he would bellow and yell with his veins bulging and his eyes popping… truly a terrifying sight to behold as a young child, especially when you knew exactly what this man was capable of: physical assault.

(Not to leave my mother out of the equation, but my father was definitely the greater tyrant in this.)

There are two major things that come out of this. The first is to acknowledge when I am starting to feel tired when I am in The Zone and to recognize that I will feel anxiety while I am within it, related to a Completion Anxiety that runs back to my childhood experience.

The second is that I can do my part to manage the expectations of my supervisors. They cannot create project plans that take into account my natural productivity boosts and latencies if I do not communicate with them. Of course, I am completely unable to control whether they desire to negotiate on this score, but if that happens, I will have closure.

Massive thanks to Stef and the FDR pre-BBQers.

Over the past few days, I read Alice Miller’s book, Drama of the Gifted Child. I finished the book this morning, which I believe culminated in a video recording. Unfortunately, the audio quality is quite bad, so I’m not sure I want to release it (I tried using the microphone embedded in the camera).

What came out of that recording, however, was too valuable to discard.

I started to talk about how I hadn’t yet gotten myself into therapy, and that I anticipated doing it soon; I’ve seen how other people have made much progress while being in therapy themselves while others that have kept themselves in isolation have made little to no progress or have even drifted away completely.

As an example, I started to talk about my father.

My father had the opportunity to pursue therapy in his early-to-mid-20s. He had read some book in which he saw parallels to his own abuse of alcohol. Instead of entering group therapy or individual therapy, however, he decided that he was going to fix it on his own–in isolation.

Why did he do this? He had a golden opportunity to discover the roots of his abuse of alcohol, to explore why he felt so empty and worthless inside. Instead, he drove himself into deep isolation and ended up attaching himself to more socially-acceptable cults.

I believe the reason he did not pursue intensive therapy is related to the fact that by his mid-20s, he had already abused and was continuing to abuse his own children.

It might be possible for somebody to recover from severe self-abuse, but once they begin to abuse a helpless dependent, recovery is damn near impossible.

Thus, by the time my father discovered that his life was proceeding towards disaster, it was already too late. In order for him to be successful in therapy, he would have to face the guilt of beating innocent children.

The end result? He continued to abuse his children, and later on acquired more children he could abuse.

Justice can never truly be satisfied in this circumstance. I can never go back and be a child again and be treated with love and respect, and neither can my parents go back to treat me with love and respect. At this point in time, it is too late. They did not demonstrate themselves to be loving and respectful people when they had all of the power in the relationship, so why should I trust their expressed desire to be loving and respectful now?

Furthermore, if they have the capacity to be loving, respectful, reasonable, and rational now, why did they not do this when I was completely under their control?

My parents, other family members, church people, friends, even strangers will tell me that I ought to forgive my parents.

Why?

It’s always put forward as them looking out for my own interests: “you can’t be angry ALL the time;” “it’s not healthy to be so angry;” “it happened so long ago, at least you’re out of there;” and other such expressions.

But why shouldn’t I be angry? They repeatedly violated me and said that it was for my own good.

These are not the actions of good people!

My parents have not approached me asking for forgiveness for the abuses of my early childhood. They merely protest and attempt to bully me into not talking about it.

The time to confess to crimes is before the victim discovers he has been defrauded.

There is such a thing as “too late.”

It might not be too late for some of those that counsel me to forgive, however.

Assaulting a child is an evil act. It is stone evil.

By telling me that I should forgive my parents, you are telling me that I should forgive stone evil. Not only that, you’re telling me that I should forgive people who aren’t sorry for assaulting me; they’re only sorry that they got caught.

If there is any hope for them, it is that they face the abyss that haunts them, and the only possible way that they are going to be able to do that is if good people stand up and say, “No more.”

But whether or not there is any hope for them is not my concern nor should it be yours.

Is there hope for you?

How can there be hope for you if you continue to protect evil?

Wherein I attempt to reconnect with my experience of home as a child…

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25.2M 36:47

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