Boredom

Boredom. My one true enemy in life.

I have a lot of things I don’t like at all. I don’t like people who are selfish and oblivious to how they hurt others. I don’t like people who try to “fix” my plans or ideas for me. I don’t like people who are uninteresting, don’t know who they are, or talk about fucking memes all the time. But I especially hate boredom. Boredom, I’d say, is my Achille’s heel, my goblin that really is the ultimate predictor of whether I will stay in a situation or not. If a job bores me too long, I’ll quit (or just stop showing up until I’m informed I’ve been fired). If a person bores me I will unceremoniously avoid talking or hanging out with them. Being bored is like being roasted alive except with being roasted alive I guess at a certain point your nerve cells burn off and you don’t feel anything but boredom is a yawning nothingness to be avoided.

It started when I first could remember things, I don’t know how old I was.

My parents lived in this trailer in the middle of nowhere, what I would later learn was Poolville, Texas and I don’t remember much but I remember being really unhappy and mad that we had to live there. There was nothing there, at some point I got an Etch-a-Sketch that I didn’t really understand the point of but as memory serves I was upset with my parents, especially my mom, for not doing enough stuff with me. I have this vivid memory of my parents explaining to me what parents are and what they are supposed to do for you. After they did, I thought about it for a little bit and then decided I wanted to meet them! I knew that my parents used the landline to call people but I was still a toddler at this point so I didn’t really understand how it worked. I picked up the phone, pressed a button, and said into it I wanted to talk to my “prezzels”. And I waited and waited and waited. . .until my mom walked by and went “what are you doing?” and I said simply “I’m calling my prezzels” (which my mother had to have me explain because prezzels is not a word) after which my mother informed me that she and my dad were my parents. I burst into tears, I was devastated! I thought I was about to be picked up by these two strangers who would love me and do stuff with me but. . .I was stuck with Nancy and Bryan. . .who obviously didn’t care for me since they weren’t doing stuff with me. Especially mom, if she loved me she’d give me attention, she’d do things with me, she wouldn’t keep me out in the middle of nowhere away from other kids. I don’t remember much else about that house than that.

My mom chose to homeschool me when she felt I was old enough. She was terrified that if I went to public schools I’d get bullied or shot or taught things that conflicted with her Pentecostal values so. . .homeschooling! I didn’t get much social interaction except with my siblings who I mostly resented because they were always getting me into trouble (how was I supposed to know I shouldn’t send my sister out to collect me ants for my frogs? I didn’t want to get bit!) so I found a lot of creative ways to keep myself entertained and a lot of uncreative ways through the medium of the Discovery Channel (I still don’t know how we had Discovery Channel in Rising Star, Texas but there you go) and video games (original Yoshi’s Island I played to death. . .the cartridge literally fell apart and my dad jerryrigged it to work). The moments I did have with neighbor kids weren’t always successful. I didn’t understand their expectations or how to interact with them, I just wanted to do the things I wanted to do. I wanted them to do those things with me and I would quickly grow upset and frustrated when they wouldn’t. I didn’t understand why they didn’t want to participate, in my young mind the things I had planned were gonna be really fun and awesome! What they wanted to do was inevitably boring to me, so I wound up preferring my own company and ideas and activities from a very young age. After all, I already had this sort of mental association that making me be bored meant you didn’t like me. Making me be bored meant you didn’t love me. If you didn’t love me, why would I want to be your friend? I had my games, I had my frogs, and when we moved to Corpus Christi I had a whole lot of wilderness and creeks to explore on the acreage we rented from a cousin. It didn’t matter that I felt lonely, and it didn’t matter that I didn’t understand other kids. I had myself and everything interesting.

It was then a doubly-hard blow when, fast forward a couple years, when my mom moved out to the middle of nowhere outside Corpus Christi to get away from my dad (who was abusive and also involved in a pitbull fighting ring, but that’s a story for another time) and then forbid me from playing video games due to getting lost in a store. I hated her for that. I still loved her, I was a child after all, but I actively didn’t want to be around her. There was no land to explore, nothing to do, nowhere to go. My readings skills were poor (at seven I still couldn’t read very well, thanks homeschooling) so reading was a frustrating endeavor. One weekend when my dad picked us up for a visit and I remember being thrilled. I didn’t like my dad at all, but for different reasons than my mom. Dad was just a brute, called me a fag when I didn’t wanna watch the dog fights, was abusive to my mom, and hated how into video games I was and that I was already turning out to be a weird kid. But that weekend? I was relieved but I also still didn’t want to go. I wasn’t very affectionate to my mom when I left because I was mad at her for condemning me to this entrapment with her though I did not want to be. But I was mad at her. So I did what I did. When we drove off I didn’t know that was the last time I’d see her alive or dead. . .my dad was a wreck and wouldn’t let us go to the funeral because he didn’t want us to see our mother as a corpse. So I didn’t see her in the casket. I didn’t see her lowered into the Earth. I was mad at him for it but at the time he assured me, funerals were boring and I wouldn’t want to see her like that. Years later my dad would tell me about how he felt when he broke the news to us. He told me he was disturbed that I didn’t cry much (I cried enough, my cousin Adrian asked me what was wrong and I told him to ask his dad) and that I immediately went back to the game I was playing on the computer. I did remember that. I remember what I was thinking while I was playing that computer game too. “Mom is dead. I should play Donkey Kong 64 next.” As long as I was doing something I didn’t have to think about the fact that my mom was dead and as soon as I stopped playing video games or fighting with my cousins, I’d start thinking about the fact she was dead, I was going to die too. Boredom meant death. Boredom meant dying.

In the realm of socialization, I was still a weird ass kid but my subconscious desire to not be bored for a single second meant that I was constantly trying to get into stuff with other kids. Everything was a constant stream of positivity to counteract that sense of despair and death I felt inside of me. If someone hated me, I could make them like me or at least I could find something for us to do together. And if no one would, well at least I had books! Once I got into school I read voraciously and aggressively and fell in love with learning because it stimulated me so deeply. I didn’t want to focus on assignments per se, I wanted to focus on those things that I found interesting which turned out to be a whole lot. My teachers generally found me difficult because I was smart but excitable and disruptive but those adults who were patient with that appreciated my cheerful demeanor, love of learning, and genuine desire to help others. This worked well until I hit 15 and started to develop symptoms of bipolar disorder. The depression was relentless and sucked the joy out of everything. I couldn’t sleep, nothing was engaging, which meant that I was deeply bored and that boredom led to this deep and horrible emptiness inside of me. A yawning void of nothingness which I feared had taken my mother and was the final place to which we would all return. Nothing was engaging enough to block it out. It was a silent scream inside of me that would not shut the fuck up, that would not leave me alone. It was populated by my shame about my sexuality, my hatred of my father which had only grown over the years, my feelings of alienation from my peers, I just wanted to be free of it. So, I very clumsily tried to slice my wrists with a fucking safety razor like a moron in a rather pathetic attempt at suicide. That was the moment I realized that hurting myself was something better than boredom. Pain was better than boredom. That emptiness could be ignored once again. I began to engage in various forms of self-harm over the years when that emptiness couldn’t be suppressed and nothing brought joy. Cutting, snapping rubber bands on myself, hair pulling, working out to the point of absolute and complete exhaustion, and eventually binge drinking were all delightful ways to hurt myself when nothing fun seemed fun anymore.

Eventually, I started dating and upon seeing self-inflicted bruises or marks from self-injury potential lovers and boyfriends would be alarmed. Those who stuck around, I found out, gave me a high and excitement greater than any forms of self-injury could give me. Finding someone who sent the alarm bells ringing in my head became of paramount importance. I wanted to be invigorated by that person, to wring out as much as I could from them as quickly as possible and then if that wasn’t enough I’d dump them and move on to the next. But if they could keep giving, keep pulling me back in, I could stay. They just had to pour enough into me so that I didn’t have to feel that boredom that led to that inner darkness, that great yawn that was buried deep inside me. In my younger days, before I got effective treatment for the depressive phase of bipolar disorder, this lent itself to me treating my lovers with a certain leeching quality. I wanted to give them all my attention and time so I in turn could be invigorated by their own energy which was always different than mine, I wanted to be revved up and turned on by them as much as possible. I was demanding, petulant, and extremely dramatic with men at times. If a guy wasn’t giving me the intensity I craved I was lining up someone else. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. . .but as I said before boredom meant you didn’t like me and if you didn’t like me, I didn’t want to be around you. As a result, once I started dating the gaps between my relationships and dalliances were non-existent. It is of no coincidence that when I did finally end up dating someone long-term (I ostensibly said I only wanted long-term relationships, but I question the truth in that) I underwent the worst depressive phases of my life. Romance and someone feeding me that sort of intensity was (and to be truthful, even now still is) my number one way to stave off the feeling of the Void.

What now of these milestone markers of how boredom has impacted my life? Honestly? Being aware of all this doesn’t do much other than key me into the fact that I have to consider whether I’m doing something because I want to or doing it just because I’m bored. I’ve received fairly effective treatment for at least the depressive phase of my bipolar disorder and honestly, marijuana has proved immensely helpful with the hypomanic side of it so those dark feelings aren’t there as often. I still try to keep them at bay though, being bored still feels like being boiled alive, I’m still always trying to do something, I still have a tendency to only do what I want to do other people be damned, and I still feel most alive whenever I have a romantic partner (or partners) giving me that excitement and invigorating energy that I desperately crave. Is boredom my actual enemy? No. Even if it feels like it. Boredom is just an emotion and there are no enemies to be dealt with. Or if there has to be an enemy. . .the only enemy is my own lack of compassion for that boy. That little boy sobbing on the floor of a trailer who thought the lack of affection he connected with boredom meant he was unloved by anyone in the whole wide world. Who spends his life running from a darkness, an emptiness, that isn’t empty at all. It is a great wind of fear and fire that tells me in this whole wide world of billions of people there is no one who will take care of my heart, that I am utterly unlovable for who I am, and that if I can’t have love I might as well have everything else.