To what extent is it possible to leave behind the residue of childhood and emerge from its risk-free cocoon into an adult of some description?
In order to truly escape, it is important to realise that a fundamental biological trait is working against us, and doing its best to strangulate the self with its own past.
(I risk looking foolish here, for I lack the technical descriptions and knowledge of biological principles to express the following argument with the fullness I'd like. I'd rather look foolish, however, than condemn myself to saying nothing at all.)
Everyday experience - I'm no scientist - has shown me that my personal biases are very quickly formed, depending on the outcome of the first occurrence:
I choked on some fish bones when I was a child. Since then, I have never been able to allow that type of fish to pass my lips without wanting to be sick.
A negative conclusion to the brief relationship with my first girlfriend led me to tearfully declare that I'd never go near another woman.*
Like any other creature, then, I demonstrated the capacity to learn things. It is the capacity to un-learn what has already been processed that I am interested in here.
Without the ability to (truly) erase our personal histories, we become fastened to a groove which is more and more deterministic with every passing day, frozen with fear into a routine which takes increasingly more energy and determination to escape from.
'Truly' erasing the past would mean more than the oft-repeated delusion that today is the beginning of the rest of my life, or that this is the point where the stupid mistakes stop, to be replaced by a machine-like precision in everything I put my name to.
It would, in fact, be more likely to be a surgical procedure: something which would go about 'resetting' the brain's infrastructure, and enabling it to start again. Such an operation would increase the probability that I'll bring my life to an end with an act of sheer lunacy, but the trade-off is the freedom to exist without parameters.
In whose interests is it that I continue to survive, a library of past mistakes and their painful consequences?
I am, according to Richard Dawkins, nothing more than a random aggregation of genetic material, and the will to proceed is nothing more than the desire of this cloud of genes not to be obliterated yet.
The sub-microscopic afflicts (is) the judgement and reason of the macroscopic. Without the genetic imperatice to learn, I should have given my being back to the soil and the rocks years ago.
Loosely, then, I conclude that I cannot escape my childhood, for my genetic roots condemn me to self-loathing without limit. I hope that more sleepless nights will convince me otherwise - some spark of insight - but the condition pessimist within makes a compelling case otherwise.
