Have I always been this way?

It seems that I've always been dedicated to learning about the world, and science, which gets us to that understanding. So dedicated, that I drew a picture of my 'dedicated face' a few years back:

But, was I always so dedicated to finding the truth? Was I destined to find this as a worthwhile ambition?

As it turns out, I've evidently been interested in science, even before I knew how to spell the word properly -- here's a "graphically-enhanced" drawing that I did while sitting at my first grade teacher's table:

  

After that year, however, my grade school education went downhill until it ended at age twelve. Even so, I still kept myself occupied with science books and magazines as a teenager, while my parents were at work.
` It wasn't until I was about 19 that I finally actually learned how science really worked, and that there was a difference between science and other things that I had thought were science -- and that's a subject for another post!

One thought keeps coming back to me, though: through all the abuse and brainwashing that I've had to go through in life, one thing that kept me interested in the world was wondering what the next new discovery would be.
` Since I had a fascination with animals, the next dinosaur skeleton or new modern species to be found was one of the things I really looked forward to learning about. Even more, while my psychotic dad would deny that my conscious perception of reality, including my thoughts and feelings, and objects that surrounded me, even existed, he would allow me to believe that most scientific developments were real.

In other words, science was my only connection to reality that I was allowed: I was always being told that whatever was happening was just one big hallucination, so I had no interest in my own personal life. It was science, the study of reality itself, that gave me hope that I could be 'real', too.
` No matter how un-real I believed myself to be, at least I could believe that there were some things in the world that were real, untouched by this insanity that I was forced to live in.

But how could life be one big hallucination? After all, I could draw pictures of things, and other people agreed that those things looked like what I drew.
` Here's a bookmark I drew on when I was six, from my desk in the corner of the classroom -- of course, cartoon characters aren't real themselves, but I was copying off of a picture in an advertisement for creepy Disney dolls that 'told stories' via cassette tape, akin to Teddy Ruxpin.

  

 
Because other people agreed that it was a good likeness, that should be evidence that my drawings were accurate, and that I wasn't hallucinating what I saw. In fact, you can identify the few drawings I had drawn from pictures or objects simply because they are so much more realistic than the rest.
` The other drawings had no real-life reference point, so my other drawings were less realistic, and usually darker and stranger -- such as the other side of the bookmark, on which I've added a colorful digital effect to make it look even more ominous:

 

 

Around the time I was pulled out of school, I largely stopped drawing things for which I had no visual reference, and only drew things that were either sitting in front of me, or in a photograph, like this dog with a bunny on its head (although in the photo, the bunny wasn't as tiny) which I watercolored at age 12:

I made this shift partly because the result was so much better, but also because it was a drawing of something I was looking at. That showed that my perception was accurate. I could show people that I saw real things! I believe that, even though I didn't really overtly understand this, it was probably one of the reasons that my art shifted to things that I saw.
` The room before me is really there! It's not a hallucination! Although I'm well-aware of 'tricks' in human perception, I'm fairly certain that reality still is reality, even if sometimes we make mistakes in perceiving it. Even so, it is still difficult to really believe sometimes.

On top of this, I find it very hard to accept that at least one of the most traumatic things that has happened to me actually has happened. There's a very real and very annoying emotional disconnect that I have that reality exists.
` While I have no emotional trouble accepting reality from a more objective perspective, I still have this problem when it comes to my own life history and subjective experiences. Human memory is not 100% accurate -- nevertheless, I don't remember ever feeling safe or happy in the past, and I do remember plenty of things that would keep someone from feeling this way.


Getting off this depressing topic, I would like to assure my readers that I am still dedicated to making new posts, it's just that I haven't been at my computer for some time. In fact, I wrote this post not long after my last post, but decided not to publish it until I looked it over once more, which, it turns out, is right now.
` I was, however, in the middle of making three new posts. What happened? A lot. I'm just busy, making Spanish teaching tools for my roommate Brianade, trying to finish a library book, and spending some time with dozens of transsexuals -- same old, same old.