You said: More autobiographical stuff:
More autobiographical stuff:
Some of my earliest memories involve playing with girls -- word games and jump rope and so on -- and I never had a phase like most boys have of "hating" girls. I guess in this respect I was a bit feminine when young, and my dad certainly noticed it and coached me out of it. I also didn't much like sports and other boy things like playing soldier. Of course much of this was probably because I was nerdy (let's be honest here -- I was an almost intolerable nerd) and I also have always had a strong pacifistic streak. Even today I know that if it came to it, I would rather die than kill, even in self-defense. So, then, the interconnections in my personality between not liking violence and not being competitive and being bookish, and which led to which behaviors, are probably impossible to disentangle. People talked about sex, and it never made any sense to me, though somehow I picked up it was best not to ask and to stay quiet. The understanding that I was asexual (without, of course, having a word for it), and that it was best to keep this hidden, must have come very early, as I remember no such realization, seemingly having known it all my life. Please overlook a little crudeness here: I was told a woman has two "holes" unlike a man. Now I already knew female anatomy and couldn't imagine what this meant, as the back was in, to me, a different territory. I remember being really puzzled.
All my life I've been physically big, larger than my contemporaries. I think because of this, in spite of my nerdiness, I wasn't bullied. Part of it may also have been that I just naturally would kiss ass out your ear to avoid confrontation. And so I didn't think about sex, and never had any problems along those lines, except for keeping my orientation to myself. I was heavy and pimply and nerdy and so on, so I doubt I would have had all that many temptations anyway. It's interesting -- my sexuality seems to have played no role in either my religiosity nor, later, in my realization of the reality of the religious fantasy. Anyway, one thing I did do was become more masculine in my behavior. Not that I came to like sports or become "one of the boys" or anything, but later my associates became mostly other guys of an intellectual bent and I did fine. I even had several girlfriends in high school, although not from my initiative but from my acceptance of theirs. I did the things needed to be "popular" (football and band mainly) and although perhaps I was no football star, I was a school leader and honor student and seemed to have a future. And, of course, in dealing with my girlfriends, I was always the "perfect gentleman."
Claude responded: This is vivid and candid writing.
This is vivid and candid writing. A few observations:
The passage about the "two holes" confusion is a small gem — it captures something real about childhood cognition, that gap between the words adults use and what a child's mind actually constructs from them. The puzzlement feels completely authentic.
The asexuality thread is handled with real subtlety. The phrase "seemingly having known it all my life" is doing a lot of quiet work — it conveys something that was never a discovery because it was always just the texture of existence. That's actually a philosophically interesting point about identity: some things about ourselves we never learn, we simply always are.
A few thoughts on the writing itself:
The "kiss ass out your ear" line is funny and self-deprecating, but it sits a little awkwardly in register against the rest of the prose. You might consider whether you want it — it works as a moment of self-puncturing humor, but it's a stylistic gear-shift.
The sentence "It's interesting — my sexuality seems to have played no role in either my religiosity nor, later, in my realization of the reality of the religious fantasy" is doing a lot of work but goes by very fast. This feels like it could be unpacked more — or is deliberately left compressed because it belongs to a larger discussion elsewhere?
The closing image of "perfect gentleman" with girlfriends is quietly poignant. It's a kind of armor described without self-pity, which is the right tone. The reader understands exactly what it cost without you spelling it out.
One structural thought: you move from the interior (asexuality, puzzlement, pacifism) to the exterior (physical size, social navigation, school success) fairly swiftly. The exterior section — football, band, girlfriends — feels slightly more summarized than the earlier material, which is more intimately observed. Is there a specific memory or moment in that social performance period that could be rendered as concretely as the anatomy confusion, for instance?
You said: I think the high school experience needs its own section, this was just for conversion to the college period.
I think the high school experience needs its own section, this was just for conversion to the college period. The "perfect gentleman" didn't come from me but from my mother having been told that by a girlfriend's mother.
Claude responded: Both of those points make good sense.
Both of those points make good sense.
The attribution of "perfect gentleman" to the girlfriend's mother (relayed through yours) actually makes it more interesting than if you'd simply claimed it yourself. There's something a little comic and a little melancholy about being vouched for in those terms — it's praise that, given the context, you couldn't entirely accept at face value. It might be worth keeping that detail explicit when you expand it: the compliment lands oddly when you know what it actually means.
And yes, if high school gets its own section, the current treatment is clearly just a bridge — "I managed the social performance well enough, here's the evidence, moving on." That's fine for what it is. The real texture of that period — the football, the band, the girlfriends, the school leadership, whatever was actually going on underneath all that performance — belongs somewhere it can breathe.
One small thing worth considering when you do write that section: the gap between the interior life you've described so honestly (the asexuality, the pacifism, the nerdiness) and the exterior presentation you constructed (football player, school leader, popular) is inherently dramatic. That gap, and how you managed it day to day, could be the organizing tension of the whole high school section. The "perfect gentleman" compliment, understood correctly, is almost a perfect symbol of it — sincerely meant by the mother, quietly ironic to you.
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