I woke up this morning thinking about emotional immaturity.
This summer’s project is to organize as much of my old writing as possible. Recently, it’s been stuff from 95-96, including stuff I wrote improvised on Grex, a message board I was active on during that time period.
One file I found is a chat log called “Fight”, which I decided to discard, but which I read through and sample below.
This was a text log from a poetry forum on Grex. The root post was a poem by John Remmers, eight stanzas of AABB metered poetry about another member, Michael Delizia.
In 2025, I would scroll past that poem, most likely without comment. Even if I were central to the forum, this particular piece didn’t need to involve me. Maybe I would make some of positive comment, if I felt the need to comment at all.
Instead, I added an insult: “You have an odd way with pointless tripe, John. You at least make it oddly entertaining. If you’d only apply yourself to worthwhile topics, you might create art. :)”
For context: John was a professor of some esteem. I was a 27-year-old PhD candidate in Linguistics at another university, a degree I should have just finished by then but which I never did finish. I was also a practicing Wiccan, and I was struggling deeply with my identity.
There were several other comments, praising John’s poem. Michael follows up with some notes about light in darkness, which I took as a jab against my emo poetry, but I just don’t see it now. I was clearly making things about me that weren’t about me. Anyway, my response to a non-existent jab: “Few of my peom are dark, Michael, you just never seem to read them…”
I don’t know if I meant “A few of my poems…” or “Few of my poems…”, but the reality is that, at that time, most of my poems were about two themes: Darkness and sex.
And this is the comment I was responding to: “I’ve been scanning the darkness lately for ironic points of light. They’re there if you look. Not many, but they’re there.” Again, this comment was directed at John (and, Michael later says, is a literary allusion anyway).
Now I can look back and realize that my response was a manifestation of RSD (Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria). The conversation goes on to make it clear that I thought I was the Poet Laureate of Grex and why didn’t people acknowledge this?
Anyway, I returned to insulting John’s poem: “I’m tempted to write ‘A Portrait of Hiawatha’ for these… the rhyme and meter are stale, and I thought John was writing them for fun, and they’re getting praise… I’m completely confused by this place now. grumble
“Then again, the poem I wrote a while back ridiculing the teen angst tone of many of the immediately ppreceding poems got praise and its satire was entirely missed, too…
“Swift and Carroll would be completely lost on many of this crowd…
“They are cute ditties, though, John. :)”
On one level, this looks like sheer arrogance. And it is really arrogant. My first response to reading this, thirty years later, was to want to slap Twenty-something Me around a bit. For f***’s sake, Me27, what IS the problem?
A day and a long sleep later, I’ll offer Me27 some grace, to mitigate: This forum was meant for serious, original, creative work, or at least I had thought. Hey, look, Autistic Rigid Thinking! “This poem violates the fundamental purpose of this community and it’s being praised. My poems, which are works of sheer genius, are being ignored. It’s not fair!”
Also, the emotional immaturity is showing itself. I’m 27 and yet writing admittedly teen angst poetry and getting upset about people’s failure to understand me (something I’ll be called on later, by an actual teen).
Thirty years on, I’ve read many of the poems in question and I don’t understand Me27. Some of it is brilliant, most of it is meh or utter crap.
Michael is confused by my reference. I’ve got the title wrong (it’s “Hiawatha’s Photographing”), which is later pointed out, but which leads to a mutual spat about who has a better understanding of parody. Reading the log, I thought then and think now that he should have realized what I was referring to, but if he saw me as a Know-Nothing Twerp, I can understand why he wouldn’t have tried harder to parse my meaning.
Anyway, that aside, I have this commentary: “Michael, I’m miscommunicating myself and I wasn’t talking about your comments anyway, so I’ll shut up. I already feel like this place is cliquish, with you and John being the Bobsey Twins Laureate and everyone else (except Shade) wallowing in stagnant teen angst. I’m overly senstive about my own poetry, which is why I’m still torn about posting here… but I need to grow up and stop whining.”
First, I was absolutely and clearly talking about his comments. I was responding directly to him. Who was I trying to convince? Objectively, that’s just a blatant lie.
Then, though, I do get to the meat of the matter: I’m overly sensitive. I need to grow up.
What happens next, though, plays directly into my masking. After I get more vicious about both John and Michael’s credentials, John offers: “Young Kershaw, by my verse unstrung, / To notions of high purpose clung; / Old Michael, citing facts of “lit”, / Cleaved to parody and wit.”
The viciousness itself is telling: I was feeling like a failure as a PhD student, in large part because my choice as a mentor (and my MA thesis chair) had so soundly belittled me during that thesis defense three years previous. “Writer” was a label that had been given to me as a child; I was the next classic writer, a misunderstood genius who (my father had told me a decade previous, around 1986) was too good to be famous.
And so why was this board, this little pond that I was swimming in, paying so much attention to these two and so little attention to me?
More to the point: I secretly respected John and Michael; I wanted to be part of their club. But they didn’t seem to respect me, so I responded like a toddler. So when John offered me the mask I was used to wearing, of a self-aware child too big for their britches, I gladly put it on: “John H. Remmers, as is he called / Has nitly picking thus forestalled. / And, with this convo on the mend, / Has managed fighting thus to end. / Mister Brighn, of ego dour / Should choose to leave his Ivory Tower / And see the point (and only one) / Is just to have a little fun. / As for the rest? Well, who’s to say? / One can only hope for play. / But ire or smile, angst or grin / To keep on fighting is a sin.
“brighn bounces off merrily“
I was offered a face-saving out, in the form of a light-hearted jab, and I took it. Decades away from the conversation, I feel like my RSD should have taken John’s comment as much less benign as I publicly showed, and Me27 may well have done so. This was not a real-time conversation; hours passed between some of the comments, and I don’t know what precisely went through my mind in those hours.
Regardless, though, I was reminded that my mask was that of a bouncy imp, hiding someone who was in deep emotional pain. In private, I was having violent meltdowns for much of the decade, coming to a head in 1996 or 1997, when I went no-contact with my mother and, as a side effect, with my brothers, who at the time couldn’t understand my disgust for her.
In public, I was a Pan-like satyr with my moments of pompous self-righteous rage (like the one shown above).
When Jenna (then 15, username “shade”) then takes me and Michael to task for being so childish (which, frankly, Michael wasn’t being), I finish putting on my mask: “Oh shade, my dear, / What’s this I hear? / You’re now annoyed / At words employed / In ways of jest / And anger blest / By interludes / Or stanzas rude / Which depricate / To deviate / Our aged ways / From solemn praise / And stoic raids / Of accolades?
“The fight is done, / No-one has won, / No-one has lost, / It had no cost — / Catharsis, just, / As often must / We adults find / Ourselves aligned / In ways stagnant / Belligerent / And bellicose / (And too verbose!) — / And so we tiff, / Not meant to miff, / But just express / Our stubbornness…
“And now you ask / A simple task? / That we express / Our adultness / And act our age?
“Take center stage!
“whooppee! Iambic diameter? Gods, it’s been ages since I wrote in iamb, it’s nostalgically fun to do it again. boing boing boing boing“
That’s where the text file ends. I assume there may have been comments after that; I likely saved it because of my bits of poetry, either being too lazy to edit out the rest or wanting to save it for context.
So who was Me27 really?
That’s why I woke up thinking about emotional immaturity.
The Silly Satyr was a mask on top of the Morally Self-Righteous Poet on top of a People Pleaser on top of a drowning person who didn’t know who they really were, an Autistic person who had spent their lifetime to that date (and years later) not understanding why they were broken in the ways that they were.
There was the paradox: Literary genius but unrecognizable as one.
There was the paradox: Intellectual genius but unable to finish a dissertation.
There was the paradox: Competent man but unable to settle on a career.
There was the experience: Autism interpreted as “emotional impairment” and treated as an inability to grow up and be a proper person.
So this extract was from me very near the nadir of my life, a pit that took me nearly 30 years to find the bottom of and nearly 30 years to crawl back out of.
Yesterday, I wanted to punch Me27 directly in the face. Now I want to hug them and tell them it’ll be okay.
The other day someone asked me what I’d say to Me18. I’ve been asked that question before, and my recurrent answer has been that they wouldn’t listen to anything I have to say anyway.
And they wouldn’t. Me27 would laugh in my face. Me18 would be confused by my existence. Me12 would refuse to talk to me.
But now I think I’ve been answering that question the wrong way around. It’s not “What do you think Me18 needs to hear?” as much as “What do you want to say to Me18?”
And that last question has a clear answer for me, now, today: “You won’t understand this now, but you’re not broken. You’re different in a way that you don’t understand yet because nobody understands it yet. So put that aside and figure out who you are.”
It’s apt that Spotify’s playlist is playing Radiohead’s “Creep” right now. I didn’t choose that, but it’s an apropos place to end this.
And now that I’m done editing, Spotify sings: “My worst nightmare is me.” (“Docket” by Blondshell featuring Bully)