SPOILER: Santa Isn’t Real!
You know that kid in your class that raised his hand to answer every question, the kid who waved his head to answer the question as though the fate of the universe itself rested on his success in wresting away the teacher’s attention? Yeah, that was me. At least that was me until I realized that I could just worke ahead in my workbook and piss off the teacher by finishing the year in the first month of any given subject. I was a bright kid who knew I was intelligent, and I had a real obsession with knowing The Truth about everything. I also never did anything without taking things about five steps beyond normal.
As you can imagine, the Santa Claus myth quickly became a point of obsession. I gathered over time that my parents were filling the role of the jolly old elf, but I hedged my bets in case they would suddenly stop buying me as many Christmas presents. However, I also needed desperately to prove that I was intelligent enough to see through their ruse. What I needed was to trick my parents into revealing the lie themselves, allowing me to prove my ability to find the truth amidst their lies while still maintaining enough righteous indignance to justify an annual offering of presents. My initial plan was to rig up a walkie-talkie under the living room table while quietly sitting in my room listening in to my parents. The implementation of this grand investigation, however, was found to be lacking since my mom discovered my covert operation when I was using masking tape to secure the walkie-talkie under the table.
Recriminations about how children who did these kind of things didn’t get presents abounded.
I decided that my ruse was up, but I still needed to play my righteous fury card to ensure a steady stream of presents. Consequently, I sat down and wrote (with pen and paper) a treatise on the folly of the Santa Claus lie and how it undermined all attempts by parents to stress the importance of telling the truth. I was ready. I dug my heels in, and I was ready for an argument.
When I presented my thesis to my mother, she did the worst thing possible. She laughed at me. Not being taken seriously was the single worst thing an adult could do to me. I took great pains to speak like an adult and think like an adult, and I therefore fully expected people to treat me like an adult at all times. I got so mad and ashamed that I just started crying, which immediately switched Mom over to consoling me rather than laughing at me.
Once I had calmed down, Mom asked me why I couldn’t have just told them that I knew. This question confounded me.
This story tells you several very important things about me.