I have had an imaginary life because I don't remember it. A little research came up with a form of Aphasia called Anomia, the inability to recall names and numbers. I also have no sense of time.
My mother has much milder anomia so since I take after her rather than my father in many other ways I think there is a genetic component to my current condition. My father was an artist and linguist, he learned Italian, French and German so he could sing along with his favorite operas. He could also read and write about 20 others languages including ancient Greek, Latin, Aramaic and pre-christian Hebrew. Then there were all the Indian languages. He could and often did make puns that were funny in three languages two of which were dead.
As I am writing I have no real idea of what I did yesterday. With work I can come up with most of it but what I recall does not feel as if it happened to me but rather as if it was something I had read or been told about. There doesn't seem to be any real way to differentiate between what is personal to me and what is not, it is all the same.
My sister takes after my father at least in her talents and as I said I after my mom.
So growing up was confusing. The stated expectation was of course that I was a chip off the old block and my failure to rise to that expectation was put down to childish rebellion and contrary laziness. And I believed it myself, absolutely, for a while. Eventually when I was in second grade I figured out that I was stupid, retarded down to the bone and deliberately being a bad and ungrateful child.
Realising my own flaws was comforting in an odd sort of way but I was always afraid someone would find out the truth of what I was and that's when I started to fake it. If you can't dazzle them with brilliance blind them with bullpoop.
Every time I failed at something I managed to convince everyone that it was merely a momentary lapse and I would redouble my efforts in future. So after being coached for an hour every evening for the friday spelling test it was obvious that my not remembering a single word was a deliberate act on my part, I was my father's son after all. Then I would come up with a good excuse and it would start all over again.
Much of the reason that I got away with things was my father himself. He was not an ordinary genius, rather one of those who was, if not crazy as a bedbug, pretty close to it. All his life he had thru brilliance of talent and force of charm and personality been able to not only create his own little world, but convince everyone around him to go along with him. What he be lived was what was and it was impossible to disagree with him, one way or another he was one of the most brilliant manipulator's I have every known. So...since my father believed that I was exactly like him I was, to him and the rest our little world. I lived every second in utter terror that He, more than anyone else, would see the truth I saw in myself and throw me away.
I use the words "utter terror" deliberately. Extreme depression and a dreadful constant fear of everything are two more of my little quirks. So two for two now...deliberate stupidity and cowardice, I was informed of both personality flaws repeatedly, for my own good of course, the supposition being that eventually I would get my act together and stop all this wussy foolishness.
Let's go for three for three shall we. I was born with a number of individually insignificant structural birth defects. The ends of all my bones, at the joints, never quite finished forming. This meant that all my hinges like knee and elbow, leaned toward being ball joints, floppy and wobbly. Ball joints like hip and shoulder tended to be a lot looser than normal. I've never dislocated a hip but have both shoulders at least twice, they go out easy but they come back in easy too. A wee touch of the old spina bifida in my lumbar vertebrae, fingers that roll and twist when I squeezed something tightly. Then I fell (walked backwards) over a cliff, broke my arm, cracked a collar bone, cracked some of the fins on my vertebrae, and torn open the back of my scalp so I have a big knotted scar on my occiput (which is why I have only shaved my head once.)
This was followed by Osgood Slaughter's disease, aka growing pains. It was diagnosed later but untreated since the treatment is not doing what is stressing the joints, which in my case was climbing up and down the near vertical side of the mountain every day. At the same time the deformation of my knee joints was slowly chewing away at the internal cartilage and my feet were so crunchy and floppy that I wore custom made (and heavy) shoes with Thomas heels to straighten out my ankles. The weight of the shoes did my knees no good atall atall. When, in my middle teens, I said screw it and chucked the special shoes my ankles flopped over instantly and it still seems to me to have been a long unpleasant trip for nothing. Eventually the knees gave up and I had surgery every couple of years to remove ground up chunks of stuff. Finally, when I was twelve, I was a 5'4" pasty white fat boy weighing 131 lbs, a bit less than 18 months later I was a 6'2" pasty white skinny boy weighing 131 lbs.
Now we have the persona dramatis, a stupid crippled kid who is terrified of everything...and nobody noticed.
Shortly after we first arrived in India, three years I think, the last big polio wave went round the world and my father got it. Parents of several other kids I grew up with were also hit my father was the worst case. After he could breathe on his own again (one week in a hand cranked iron lung) they flew us back to the states. It took two years of surgery and rehab before we could return to India.
My father's will-power writ large. He had been a big 6"1' strong right handed commercial artist. His right arm from the elbow down was permanently paralysed, his legs were half shot, his left arm good from elbow to fingers except for the index finger, all the balance of a pool cue.
They said he'd never get out of bed. They said he'd never get out of a wheelchair. They said he'd never walk without leg braces and crutches.
Finally they said he'd never be an artist again. Then they opened up his left hand, split a tendon, and gave him fingers again. Then he taught himself to draw and paint and write left handed. Then he convinced the Mission that he really didn't need to walk around much to do the job that they had originally hired him to do. So we went back to India.
When I say that nobody noticed me it is for the same reason that you can not see stars in the daytime, the sun is too bright. My mom had a very bad back, my sister was little, and I was my father's son. A good motto not only for my family but for almost a missionary families back then is "Push yourself until you break to pieces...then push the pieces." To fail was not only to fail yourself but to fail your community and ultimately the God whose work you were doing among the heathen, it really wasn't done.
In conclusion, and I hope never to write such a long post again, between constant fear and depression, and chronic unrelenting pain, and forgetting my friends and my teachers names overnight my life was and still is a source of infinite and constant amusement and confusion. And still nobody really knows...or believes.
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