It bothers me, sometimes, how so few of my friends have a working class background.

It’s not an ideological worry. It’s not the one about the socialist who suddenly finds that they’ve lost their grounding and flails hysterically at the world in hope that somewhere, somehow, there will be enough purchase to re-anchor their beliefs.

It is and it isn’t about haves and have-nots.

I have trouble calling it anything else than cultural.

I’m white trash — raised in a dog-eat-dog world. Drinking, fighting, smoking, stealing and backstabbing were the only things most adults I had lasting contact with from the age of six and on did on a somewhat regular basis. Some of them did drugs, but that was shunned by most, for some reason.

I never started smoking because it was simply too commonplace. It held no mystery. Stealing had a purpose. There was gain in stealing. Smoking just made you smell bad.

Given, I was a peculiar child from the beginning — for various reasons. I was always a little bit to the side, head cocked and eyebrow raised. I always had an angle.

I am a brilliant liar.

I hate lying.

I lie with the same ease as middle-class people move through other people’s opinions while not seeming to register them at all. Granted, I suppose a lot of people do. It’s just a question of whether you’ve got control over it.

Society taught me to lie. Since, I’ve taught myself to be honest.

I suspect my parents inadvertently taught me that there were several sides to every story.

My mother said my father was an egotistic asshole. My father said my mother was a vacuous tart.

I was fairly sure they were both right. I still loved them, because they were my parents, and because they weren’t all bad. My mother could be immensely loving and sweet (in the moments when she wasn’t showering her latest bad boy lover with that attention) and my father did care a lot and taught me stuff (when he remembered I existed at all.)

They were never — after the age of six or so — my role-models, though. I knew my parents were deeply flawed. When other kids competed in trying to out-aggrandize their dads, I stepped to the side, bewildered at their stupidity.

I built my role-models from stories; from television; from glue and paper and sand;

from the spirits I talked to all the time.

I’ve no idea if they were real; if they are real, if I’m honest. I just know they’re there. If they’re just in my head, fine. It doesn’t really matter much. I’ve no need to pretend I’m sane.

My paternal grandmother made very serious attempts to make a good little christian of me. For years, I obediently said my nightly prayers and never swore around her.

After praying, I lay in my bed talking to the spirits, as always. They actually seemed to like my prayers. Granted, said prayers quickly started to mutate once my grandmother wasn’t listening.

Thinking about it makes me smile. I never had any reason to doubt that my grandmother loved me, just as my spirit companions always seemed to have my best interest at heart, even if some of their lessons were hard.

Maybe my grandmother is a spirit now. I’ve no idea how it works. I hope she’s in whatever heaven she believed in. She’s my next-favourite relative. (My favourite relative doesn’t figure in this story.)

I was seventeen when it eventually dawned on me how far from normal I really was; how tenuous my connection to the surrounding culture. While I hadn’t been friendless, my connections to the kids I’d hung out with had always been somewhat distanced and perfunctory — based on similar interests and circumstance rather than any deeper bond.

I consciously started teaching myself to care — to connect with other people. It took me a long time, but I started being able to fake it pretty early. Also, I found I could care a lot for some people. I could fall in love.

Damn, could I fall in love.

The more I connected, the more I could feel something build in me — something that had been there all along, but had been kept in check by my disconnectedness.

Turns out empathy and socialisation came at a steep cost.

I was twenty-one when the anxiety finally broke all the seals and came flooding out. It took well over five years of therapy (my sense of time is fleeting) to learn to cope with it all. Age thirty-three, I’m still effectively a disabled person because of it, but it rarely reaches critical levels anymore.

I was saying, it bothers me, sometimes, that so few of my friends are working-class.

Perhaps it’s not even working class, where I come from. Seems like almost everyone I’ve met who grew up that way have become either violent criminals or… well… their parents. I know; I’ve seen it happen.

I also know I was close to being a sociopath before I made myself connect emotionally to the world around me.

As far as I can tell, the same disposition (most likely at least partially genetic) that led to my being effectively incapacitated by anxiety and depression saved me from being too accurate a reflection of the society that bore me. It warped me, if you will, to the point where I could actually develop into… something else.

On the surface, that something else gets along a lot better with people who’ve grown up in middle-class homes. Granted, another thing these people generally have in common is that they’ve all slid out of their grooves, somewhere. They’re all somewhat aberrant and unusual. Outsiders. Middle-class outsiders. These are generally my friends. We mostly share the same interests and pursuits. We get along and we have fun together.

The problem is that when those same middle-class outsiders start talking about their brushes with “the dark side” and how they were crazy when they were in their teens, our common ground disappears. That dark alley where they went to find their limits was the place I came from. I never needed to test my limits because I already knew if they existed at all, they were completely fleeting. I had drunk, doped, fought, stolen, backstabbed and very, very nearly killed well enough by the time I was fourteen — all as a matter of course.

Most of them smoke, by the way.

So I live a kind of double-life. When I’m with my friends, I socialise — if sometimes awkwardly — as one of them. When I’m on my own, I can let the rest of me come out and play. On occasion, some of what’s deeper inside will slip out in conversation, but middle-class people are great at missing these things, so it has very rarely gotten in the way. If they notice at all, they tend to blame it on my anxiety and social phobias. I’m fragile and unfortunate, you see.

Oh, so very fragile. Ho, ho.

I have one friend — one single friend who seems to understand at least to some extent. He comes from a similar background — quite possibly worse; we rarely talk about these things. He also seems to have somehow ended up warped and tangential to his surroundings. We speak similar hybrid languages; have the same talent for seeing through the bullshit. I value him a great deal more than he will probably ever realise.

He smokes.

I don’t smoke. I never saw the point.