"Hermit" Is Not A Life Goal.

When I was in fifth grade we had to keep class 'journals'. Every day we were given a topic question and then we had to write about it. There were two questions that I answered 'incorrectly' which raised some red flags and resulted in parent teacher conferences. These two things have stuck in my craw for, I don't know, twenty or so years now. :)

The first was: If you could drive any kind of car when you grow up what would it be?

My answer was that I wanted to drive a hearse. Not a hearse like you see today, but a glass-paneled horse-drawn hearse like the Black Moriah in Tombstone (because of course, I'd just been there and it's super cool. Who wouldn't want to drive that thing?). It of course would need to be painted purple, because everything is better in purple.

(This is the Black Moriah, just for reference)

This immediately got me flagged as 'troubled'. Now, sixth grade was not my finest year. In fact, my life was at its most chaotic at this point, for a variety of reasons that aren't worth going into here. What is worth mentioning though is that for all the darkness in my life at this point, I was still a model student 99.9 percent of the time, and the legit issues that I had were the result of poor social skills and a total inability to read subtext. At any rate, I remain irritated that my purple hearse was deemed so socially unacceptable that my parents had to be called in. I felt then, much as I do now, that I justified my decision well, and that it was a reasoned and rational answer to an open ended question. Besides that, I don't think a purple horse drawn hearse is the hallmark of a serial killer in the making.

What I learned from that first 'wrong' answer was that people don't actually want to know what I want. They just want to hear that I want the same things (or at least similar things) that they do. I spent most of the rest of the year answering my questions based on what I thought my teacher wanted me to like. This, strangely enough, has been a valuable life skill, but that I suppose is neither here nor there.

The second question was: What do you want to be when you grow up?

This seems like a fairly straight forward question. I lapsed a little on my previously strict 'only write what the teacher wants to hear' rule on this one, though I did censor myself somewhat.

As I'm sure you know Dear Friend, as a child I wanted to be one of two things when I grew up.

The first was a grizzly bear so that I could live alone in the woods and eat lots of berries...and also, you know, anyone who bothered me. I opted out of giving this response since years earlier I had been told that I shouldn't want to eat people, and that no matter how hard I try I'll never EVER be able to be a grizzly bear. Never mind that eating people wasn't my goal per-say, but rather the consequence of sustained and forced social interaction. And never mind that my whole life everyone was preaching the 'you can be anything you put your mind to' mantra, so 'anything' does not include bears? Seems to me like someone should have qualified that one before I had my heart set on something outside the 'anything' realm.

Anyway, the second was a hermit, so I could live in the woods and eat lots of berries and be left alone. This, truthfully, remains my life goal, though it takes on other names from time to time (and now it's more like the high desert than the woods, but you get the idea). At any rate, this was not acceptable either as everyone is so concerned with socialization and social interaction and networking and whatever else that they just can't grasp why anyone (who wasn't a potential serial killer) would want to be alone all of the time. My parents were subsequently called, counselors were consulted and I retained the mark of the troubled child.

But the fact of the matter is that I'm the happiest and the least lonely when I'm alone. This has always been true for me, even as a very small child. Other people, well, some other people, I guess I should qualify that - close friends and immediate family - are fantastic parts of life. Amazing and wonderful, and all sorts of other things, but without quality (and quantity, really) time alone to recharge all of that becomes meaningless as the amount of sensory input just shuts my brain down and I fail to function. Besides that, other people slow me down. They are, for the most part terribly inefficient, talking constantly about things they want to be doing, or could be doing, but not actually doing them. That bothers me. I just want to sit down somewhere quiet and do things. I do not want to have to sit down and talk about all the possible ways to go about doing it.

Anyway, my point in all of that is, that my end goal, even now, is to get to a point where I can spend the majority of my time alone, working on research/projects that interest me with minimal forced day-to-day interaction with other people. I'm not opposed to having to work with other people, really I'm not. But I want to get to a place where I'm able to have some level of control over how much face-to-face interaction I have to have on a daily level.

People ask me what specifically I want to do with my degree, and I don't have a good answer for them. Because the fact of the matter is that I don't really care WHAT I'm doing, so long as I'm doing it somewhere quiet, and preferably alone. That's just where I do my best work. Simple fact.

But no matter how carefully I word my response, and no matter how carefully people try to word their replies, what their answers always boil down to is this:

Being a Hermit is not a (socially acceptable) life goal.

And you know what? I think that's lame. I think it was lame when I was in fifth grade, and I think it's lame today. We're not all the same, and our end goal shouldn't be to homogenize the human experience to the point where we all fit comfortably into tiny little socially acceptable boxes. I don't recoil in horror when I meet someone who wants to be a pharmaceutical rep, even though that's my own personal version of hell, why does everybody recoil when I say my end goal is a quiet life of introspection?

At any rate, today (while having this hermit conversation yet again) I came up with the solution to my problem. From now on whenever anybody asks me about my life goals or what I want to do with my degree or anything else I'm going to tell them my goal is retirement. How I get there is irrelevant, as long as I get to retire. And do you know why? Because that period, the post-retirement period, is when reclusive behavior begins to become socially acceptable. Because at 65 or 70, society assumes you've earned the right to pack up and move into the a yurt in the middle of the desert to eat nothing but cactus fruit and scorpions and only to interact with other people at their leisure.

At 28 however, it's still as unacceptable as it was at 10.

And for that matter, it's still almost as unacceptable was wanting to be a grizzly bear. . .it's just slightly more plausible.

And that Dear Friend, that, was all she wrote.

I miss you terribly. I hope your weekend is marvelous, and say hello to P for me. (Bebop too). Lots of love.

Me