Killspeak

One thing that made me feel strange as I was growing up—I remember feeling it first when I was about five or six—was that much of what I learned was already known by the adults around me. When I realized that all the adults around me knew how to add and subtract and write in cursive, indeed, had known all along, I felt a little more grown up and a little cheated. Now I was operating at the same level that, say, grandma was working on (cursive-wise; I didn’t yet understand why dad used all-caps printing); but why had she kept all this to herself? Why was I so late to the game?

(Does this in any way relate to the ignorance and confidence I sense when reading things written a long time ago? Did the medieval and modern pre-Freudian worlds feel just as capable and cheated when came the Renaissance and the theory of the unconscious?)

I was not conscious of my “inability to grasp… any very large portion of human knowledge.” This I admitted to myself only when I became a teenager. That until I was fifteen I felt excluded from the adult world—of driving and long division—rather than feeling simply unready or uninterested seems, in retrospect, a little odd. At what point should I feel cheated of my childhood naïveté, my lack of responsibility and bills?

Being an adult child (as a child—whatever) was a confusing thing.