'Self' as the socializer

The one thing that is and was determinative to my identity and being was being left to my 'Self'. Self was my main, and mostly, sole companion as a toddler and pre-schooler. Having stair-step elder sisters and a stair-step, 3-year, younger sister facilitated the occurrence by the gender acculturation on us kids. My elder sisters were culturally and socially being sucked into girl/female identities. My younger sister was a pre-articulate toddler.

I had months of time by myself, since my nature and behavior required little monitoring and attentiveness by my mother and others, BECAUSE I was pre-occupied with 'Self'-interaction. This interaction was the surrogate for regular socialization with my age contemporaries. The 'relationship' I developed with my 'Self' became so intensive that not only a social mores expectation was implicitly made, but the focus of the attention was unique to my limited physical realm and the imagination that percolated from my subconscious. The percolation from the subconscious was symbols, mostly. Those symbols were the pre-articulate forms with which I 'played'. In that play and pre-cognition of awareness I had my own self-acculturation with my temporality.

The vocabulary, linguistic forms of expressions and sayings were an unique, idiosyncratic addendum to what was occurring with my carnal associations of family, relatives, and other social associations. It would not be until I entered kindergarten that I experienced the shocking contrast and needed adaptiveness and flexibility to the external social world. The distinguishment between the external social world and the inner world I had nourished would remain. The distinction between the external social mores of people and my internal relationship with 'Self' would blur under the layers of formal and informal social indoctrination. The serendipity of events, partially effected by the increasing contention between me and the social rules, would bring me back to the solitude with 'Self'. That re-acquaintance would be an involuntary reunion of discomfort due to the emotional distance that had been engendered by my involvement with the social forces of relationships-obligatory and elective. The reunion gave me an appreciation of my-'Self' that had been forgotten and taken for granted in the acculturation of getting-on and getting along in school and with people, in general.

The introspective thought-life induced by my drug intoxications of 1969-1971 unfettered the self as THE virtuous, consistent, and friendly be-ing in my consciousness. That relationship would be reinforced by the events of college, armed services induction obligated by my low draft-number-#36. The relationship would be intensified by the occult factors of coincidence that were part and definers of the experiences during the post-high school and beyond family in the freedom that college and the required military enlistment that allowed for the expanded latitude of my conception and very, esoteric, and idiosyncratic articulating forms of my perception of that on-going experience.