And then there was my father. Boy, if you think the Angry Men of Broadsheet (as another LW in another thread called people like MerelyMortalMale) are aggressive and illogical, you should have seen my old man. Talk about verbal abuse, dysfunctionality, actually damaging his children and his wife. In a final tour de force of dellusional psychosis, he managed to destroy the whole family in a rather gruesome way (I won't go into the details because this is not just my story to tell). Furthermore, I was also sexually abused (not by my father) -- you might even say 'raped', since this word, especially in feminist circles, now covers a wide variety of situations -- which didn't help me come closer to the real world.

So I was indeed a strange kid. In terms of relations with women, much more fascinated by my porn-fueled internal world than by any real women I saw around myself -- not because I hated them especially, but because I was sort-of convinced the whole world contained only bad people. So the first girl who actually showed some romantic interest in me -- only god(dess) knows why; perhaps she really was one of those MPDGs discussed in another thread -- got absolutely no cooperation. I freaked out. A girl in reality? Wanting? To go out? With me? Smiling? At what? I say? Wanting? To talk? To me? Pretty? Sexy? Even intelligent? Interested? In Biology and Zoology? And Literature? NO! This can't be true! Me? A girlfriend? I'm blushing! NO! Stop that! Run! Run! NOW! Go back to fantasyland, to good, old, controllable make-believe worlds, where impossibly beautiful naked hot girls do whatever you want them to do, except existing! Oh please, please, give me porn and masturbation, but not this girl! NOT THIS GIRL!

So I chickened out. I ran away, didn't return her calls, avoided her like the plague, and never gave her -- or anybody -- a friggin' explanation for my behavior. After a while, she got the message and left me in peace. And I did my utmost not to think about her, to forget her. And it worked; I can only vaguely remember her face, and I don't know her name anymore. I'm really sorry for that now; if only I could remember her name, I might try to find out where she is now and call her to apologize. Unfortunately, I can't do even that.

Indeed I was a strange 14-, 15-, 16-year-old. The über-dweeb, maybe your worst-case-scenario dellusional introvert, worse than what you -- or his parents -- may fear for your son's friend, Anonymous_Too. I avoided women like the plague, I preferred my little masturbatory fantasies, the House of Mirrors as Milan Kundera put it, I was afraid of women, I was bored with them, because they were real people, and real people were boring. And yet... look at me now. I'm an assistant professor (effective next semester), I have found a wonderful companion whom I've married, and I have a wonderful five-year-old daughter who will -- as far as my effort is concerned -- grow up to be an intelligent and independent woman. She's even quite pretty (though I'm probably biased, being her father). I have several people, men and women, that I do regard as true friends. And I'm even concerned with things like gender stereotypes and feminism -- enough to be posting here.

What happened? First of all, my sisters got me to behave in a more "socially acceptable" way. Thanks to them, I started paying more attention to my looks -- despite all they had to go through, they still turned out to be two wonderful human beings. Better-looking glasses, better clothes, more frequent baths (a must in a tropical country like Brazil), a deodorant. Just this was enough to change some people's attitudes towards me, and make me look more 'normal'. Not that it changed my attitudes very much: if people treat me better just because of my clothes and external appearance, now, how shallow is that? They're certainly still bad.

The biggest change happened when I left highschool and went on to study at the local university. People looked more like the inhabitants of my imaginary world; you see, all those characters in the works of literature I had read, who had real souls and real issues, people like Anna Karenina, Raskolnikov, Jeal Valjean, Julien Sorel, Holden Caulfield and his sister Phoebe... People with real souls. As I thought about that, after a while, it hit me.

We are all characters in stories.