Hard Wired

Coming to terms with human flaws requires you put them all in the same basket, your flaws with those of others.
My Dad was an abusive and hateful man. He came by it honestly, as both his parents were that way. I suppose it was just part of the hard poverty background. At any rate, my Dad’s overuse of intimidation gave me a very fearful childhood, replete with nightmares every time I fell asleep, and all sorts of other neuroses.
You have to understand how a person can love and despise the same person all at once. The Principle of Propinquity makes us care about people, even if we are ready to kill them, simply because of physical proximity over time. A portion of you realizes their welfare is your responsibility on some instinctive level, even when it all conflicts with your own sanity.
Sanity does not require you banish all compartmentalization. Otherwise, a great many more people would have died by murder and neglect than is already the case.
At some point, I decided to use my spite for Dad to reject copying his ways. That didn’t prevent me having some of the same reflexes, but it did prevent me ending up like him. To this day, I am certain he does not think he was abusive. Not quite psychopathic, but he never understood empathy, never had any. By contrast, I am burdened with excessive empathy, which is precisely how I remained so fearful so long. My sensing of human emotion was overwhelming and I had no filtering mechanism. I remained emotionally swamped long into my young adulthood. I also learned to act to cover it all up.
At some point, I found out where to turn it off. At first, during my adolescence, I could only turn it off all together, so as to perform some acts which remain tender scars on my soul even now. But with time, I learned some fine control, and how to avoid bumping old wounds most of the time. The coping mechanisms are now pretty strong, and the skills to act on the resolve to do good for others has grown to a satisfactory level.
The hardest thing is letting stuff go because I simply cannot do any good with it. Stupid can’t be fixed.
I live in close proximity to someone who can just barely function because she can’t differentiate between major and minor. She will obsess over things which simply do not matter, will pick over them endlessly, making all Creation wait until she’s satisfied some utterly insignificant detail is fixed to her liking. That’s not as much hyperbole as you might think, because it borders on OCD. You may have seen the video of the guy you can’t let the fringe on his floor rug get out of perfect combed alignment. He spends hours dragging his fingers across the edges of his rug because it drives him mad to see the threads not perfectly straight. He can’t control this, so far as anyone can tell. This person I deal with can control it, but gets angry and takes it as some grand personal insult when you suggest these little things are not a priority. The OCD guy knows it’s crazy; she rejects the truth.
So, every day we have to tiptoe around her defenses and help her understand there are things she can’t fix. That is, they can’t be fixed without unreasonable effort compared to what difference it makes. The reason it’s a problem is she gets so tired working over silly stuff, she has no energy for things which do matter. So on the one hand, she makes everyone wait, even to the point of denying her children food for hours at a time while she picks over the silliest details of food preparation. Breakfast started at 7AM is finally ready at 9. This is not healthy. On the other hand, she never washes the dishes because she simply has too many other things to do. Her kitchen is counter is covered in dirty dishes, and you can’t find the sink. Dishes get washed when someone else does them.
The only thing worse would be involving the county child welfare, because those people are all far worse, the scum of the earth, psychopaths. They seriously need adult supervision.
But I can’t fix her problem, either. Yes, there has been progress. I limit what I work on with her, and let the rest go. I refuse to stop trying. It’s the same business of human character, following the impulses which drive each one of us.
Inside that whiny little boy I was, there lived a grand risk taker. Not in the sense of big, heroic deeds for all to see, but in the sense I’ll push myself to extremes. I like to hike six or more miles at a time, despite my knees and hip hurting. I ride my bicycle 20-30 miles over some very hilly terrain because it feels good in one sense, even though it makes my old leg muscles hurt. I’ll push until I drop, if there seems even a scintilla of a reason. It answers some deep, nameless need. I know it’s not trying to prove anything; I’m just having fun. My brand of “fun.”
I recall at age 12 playing in a sand and gravel pit on Saturdays when the workmen were gone. The sand was piled up like a massive mountain, but packed on top. They would pull from one side, building from the other, marching the whole thing across the open gravel bottom over a month or so, then back. I’d climb the hard packed side, then run and jump as far as I could off the cliff where they pulled it. Given the lateral distance off the face, I’d drop some 30 feet (9m) into the soft sand below, buried up to my hips from the momentum. Then I’d leapfrog, or roll sideways, the rest of the way down to the bottom. Repeat no less than a dozen times. It took a good bit of shaking and slapping to get the sand out of my clothes when I was done.
During the very worst period of my knee troubles, I was with a group of teenagers at a woodland camp during a winter break from school. The camp offered a High Ropes Course — a confidence challenge course with more than adequate safety measures. Our first event that day found us sitting at the foot of two massive hardwood trees. Between were a stacked series of small platforms. The objective was to climb a rope ladder to the first platform well over head height. Jump across some 3-4 feet (1m) to the other platform, and climb another rope ladder. Repeat as needed up to six levels. I was really out of shape, and couldn’t stand on my feet longer than some fifteen minutes at a time. I walked with a cane because my wheelchair could not navigate this place. But when no one moved to be first, I jumped up. I made it up three levels before I simply ran out of breath and got dizzy from the effort. The leap across the gap was piddling by my standards, and we were all connected to a safety line from above, but I was a fat wimp who needed his wheelchair. My measure of success got them going, and most of them cleared more than I did.
It’s the same personality that keeps doing the dishes for this crazy woman.