After the End: Confidence

When I was six, I was angry. I remember arguing with my father over math homework I insisted I didn't know how to do, even though I did. I remember again being spanked a lot with a belt and a lot of yelling and insults being hurled at me. What I don't remember is anything else from age six. It's a blank. I recall back to the crib at six months of age and forward from age eight. I'm told I changed at age six, and went from being happy, talkative, and agreeable to being surly, secretive, and argumentative. But six and seven are almost entirely blank otherwise. Aside from my father and the belt, I get a mental image of an uncle by marriage who I feel did something terrible, and a lot of anger and very little else.

I recall the fighting with my dad and the realization that I couldn't trust him. That I wanted to trust him, to tell him about my uncle, but I couldn't and I felt that despondency from four again, but constantly. I was angry, but to show that to my father was to get a beating. I was afraid but to show him that was to get a beating. I was deep in grief, but to share that with him that was to get a beating. I couldn't talk to him. My parents tried to get me to talk. The feeling that I couldn't trust them deepened, so that one of the few things from six I do recall is vowing to never tell them another thing about myself again in my life. It was a vow I took very seriously. I didn't have parents; I had enemies. I put on a mask and lapsed into silence. If they insisted I talk, I tried very hard to figure out what they wanted to hear, and parrot the expected words when I could. My own self-image on that level became a desperate attempt to mirror what was expected of me. I set my own gauge of safety and success outside myself.

By seven the despair from the isolation, the confinement, and the loss of a sense of self was overwhelming, and the only thing at all from age seven I remember is standing in a friend's back yard. Whoever the friend was, was inside, as were his parents. I stood at the edge of their pool, at the deep end and went into a fugue state staring into the depths of the water. And, staring thus, I leaned forward and dropped myself into the water and forced all the air from my lungs, and willed myself down. I recall looking up through the water and seeing a blur of shapes running around the pool, then diving in to pull me out, and that's all of age seven I have left anymore.