“My mother’s treatment of me in my childhood psychologically damaged me permanently.”
Noah, a common person in uncommon circumstances, describes his childhood as one of struggle—both regarding home life and mental health.
Noah grew up with an alcoholic mother, who was a regular drinker from when Noah was three years old to when he was ten (although the problems didn’t stop there). Noah explains the treatment his family received: “She would regularly scream at my sisters and I over small things; I also remember being hit a few times. However, my father took most of the abuse.”
He vividly recalls a time when his mother was outraged when his father forgot the birthday of the mother’s niece. Noah also remembers his mother “talking about her other boyfriends, threatening divorce, and even going so far as physically abusing him.” Yet his father couldn’t even block the hits without accusations that he was the abusive one. In these moments, Noah—and his sisters—felt helpless and “unable to do anything about it.”
The clearest memory Noah has from this situation is when his mom took Noah and his sisters on the run. He states, “My dad, followed by a number of cops, tracked her down to a hotel about an hour away from home. They entered our room to find my mom alone; she had left us in the pool with a stranger, so she could drink on her own.” After this, his father sent Noah’s mother to a rehabilitation facility in Arizona. Following her return, she was sober until Noah’s sophomore year of high school.
“Within months of her beginning to drink again, she grabbed my younger sister and throttled her because she had gotten back from being out with her friends; my mom thought that we should all have her as our first priority.” That month, Noah’s younger sister attempted suicide.
His mother refused to admit her actions led to the suicide attempt. Rather, she blamed Noah for her drinking and the family’s problems, given that Noah is on the spectrum. On Mother’s Day, the family forgot the holiday; in response, Noah’s mother claimed that they don’t care about her nor deserve her as a mother.
Noah considers that “Perhaps she was right, but not in the way that she meant.” The incidents left “lasting mental scars” on the children. Noah reflects, “The fact that my own mother treated me like this affected my ability to trust others. Her regular negative influence reduced my self-esteem to nearly zero. It also gave me a sense of learned helplessness since nothing I did stopped her.”
However, this experience also taught Noah resilience. He now avoids alcohol, and an intervention in his junior year of high school got him “off the track that would have inevitably led to suicide.”
The bullying Noah underwent in elementary school, along with certain betrayals in middle school, taught him distrust and isolation. He thought that “perhaps it would be best to keep myself isolated from the outside world.” Nevertheless, “That was perhaps the greatest mistake of my life as of yet.”
In his sophomore year, he bonded with a girl until they became close friends before being ditched by her at a homecoming dance because she felt that he was “boring” and “weird.” The girl left with another boy, ceased to speak to Noah, and spread false rumors about him.
“I was broken by this,” Noah says. “How could someone who I was so closely bonded with betray me like this?”
Unfortunately, this was just as Noah had been working to overcome his isolation. But now, he had returned to lockdown.
Despite this, a small encounter changed the course of Noah’s life. In lunch one day, his breakage of emotions from the outside world was visible to a girl he didn’t know well. In the lunchroom, he was mostly friendly with the people there, though due to the antics of a political rivalry and some misunderstandings, he didn’t trust the girl there.
He was shocked to receive a text from her that read, “Are you okay?” It seemed that she was the only one who noticed his shattering distress. Yet he was reluctant to answer due to his distrust: “I didn’t know whether she was trustworthy enough to have this information.”
They texted back-and-forth for two weeks as she continued to press, slowly breaking down the wall and chipping away at bits of the story. One morning, Noah was in math class when his phone buzzed: “I think I know what’s wrong,” she sent. It was in this moment that Noah conceded to trusting her, finally understanding that she’d gone out of her way to uncover the situation and extend support.
For the next few months, the girl persisted in encouraging Noah to open up, even offering him strategies to cope with his depressive emotions. The friendship taught Noah a multitude of valuable lessons: “She quickly became one of my closest friends of my high school experience, altering the path of my life even up to this point, years later. While I still flirted with my old ideas of isolationism for some time, because of this, I eventually cast out the idea, which is a lesson I still keep to this day. It also showed me that not everyone who seems untrustworthy actually is, and that my initial assumptions about others can be entirely false. The two of these have led me to change my behavior for the better when meeting new people.” Since then, Noah’s mental health has vastly improved.
But this isn’t the only aspect of life where Noah experienced a major transformation. “Until about four years ago, I was a very devout and evangelical Baptist. Politically, I believed in a borderline Theocracy.” Over time, as Noah spent more time immersing himself in school as a form of distraction, he performed a 180 and fell deeply into science. His deconversion switched his political views from Conservatism to Libertarianism and rather than espousing a Theocracy, he advocated for Technocracy instead. Quite a drastic change, eh?
Although, his embracement of science led to his biggest change—one that regarded his sense of purpose. Noah explains, “In all respects, I am a Nihilist. There is nothing but the natural world—nothing guiding or protecting us. When we die, that is it. One day, a loved one will remember us for one last time; then, we will be permanently forgotten from history. There are no objective moral guidelines, only societal and personal ones. There is no inherent purpose in life especially since the universe is going to continually decay into equilibrium. Anything I achieve means nothing in the end.”
At first, Noah found his realization disturbing, especially in his transitionary agnostic stage. Losing his faith for Christianity, he fell into “a pit of depression.” He reconciled the nihilistic belief with a better perspective: “Without an absolute purpose in life, we are free to find our own purpose.” Noah defines his life by two such purposes—helping others and the advancement of science.
“Yes, we will all inevitably die and eventually be forgotten forever. Yes, the universe will decay, and everything we do doesn’t matter in the end. However, that says nothing for what matters now. Me comforting a friend matters to them right now. Tutoring someone in a subject I’m strong in matters to them now.” Through this, Noah found a deeper meaning that he could act upon once he escaped his bout of isolationism. Having been helped by others, now Noah pays the positivity forward and does the same.
In the realm of science, Noah seeks comfort anywhere from the subatomic and microscopic world to that of the greater cosmos, immersing himself in studies related to physics, biology, and chemistry. “The more I learn about the world around me, the more I want to know.”
This curiosity drives his fascination with concepts such as the Fermi Paradox. “Where is everybody?” he asks. Noah has a theory—he speculates that “While simple life is likely very common, complex life is extremely rare.” This leads him to wonder what factors lead to intelligent life and the alternate paths life could have taken.
“Remove the random collision that turned one into what are now mitochondria, and eukaryotes would likely have never formed. Change the course of the asteroid that struck out planet 66 million years ago by just a few degrees, and mammals would likely have never rose. Make the volcanic eruption in Indonesia that nearly wiped our species off the face of the Earth just a little bit stronger, and our species would not have survived to today.” How’s that for late-night thoughts?
It becomes evident that despite his adversity, Noah found his lifelong passion—a beacon of hope for those undergoing similar struggles.
Although Noah has delved deeply into the secular world, he acknowledges that his family’s religious background may still influence some of his values. He can’t say for sure that he’s forever abandoned religion: “After all, five years ago, I could not have imagined myself ever joining the atheistic heathens that I so strongly believed were wrong, yet here I am today.”
Noah reveals a haunting truth from which we are no exception: “No one knows what the future has in store for them, and I am no different.” And neither are we.
About Noah
One with hope despite adversity; a common person in uncommon circumstances
NOTE: Name has been changed
Definitions
Fermi Paradox: The discrepancy between our expected existence of alien signals and the universe’s apparent lack of them
-Vox
Between the Lines 