I have already written previously about how counterproductive authoritarian parenting is, but this is a fact that I simply cannot emphasise enough. Educators are always talking about the importance of encouraging children to read and write, but my parents have always discouraged me from both. Maybe this sounds unbelievable, but I think it is quite common among parents from certain cultural backgrounds. My parents dismissed anything that I read or wrote outside of what was required for school or a job or some other official purpose as “frivolous” and a “waste of time”.
My parents had mostly ignored my writings in elementary school, but I think this was because they had assumed that everything I wrote was “for school”. My father would occasionally pick up something I had written; he would frown or glare at me, or make some negative remarks, but at that time he did not order or pressure me to stop. I think his comments at the time were mostly directed at the school system for what he perceived to be a waste of my time for requiring me to write essays on topics he considered unimportant — or, even worse, fictional stories. I have never witnessed my father reading anything but newspapers and technical books, nor my mother anything but recipes, and to my knowledge neither has ever read any novels or other forms of fiction outside of what they were required to study when they were in school.
I wrote whatever was “in demand” — I received requests from friends, classmates, and teachers for my thoughts and opinions on various subjects, and if some topic or idea was especially popular, I wrote about it. Homework assignments I treated as a kind of “top priority” request, because they had externally imposed hard deadlines. But I was so far ahead in my writing assignments that many were near completion by the time they were assigned, ready to be handed in after putting in some finishing touches. A large part of the reason for that was because I had a lot of friends who were one or two years older than I was. When we got together, they would occasionally discuss their homework assignments, and so I got a glimpse into what was required of me in school a year or two ahead. The open secret with high school homework assignments is that they don’t change very much from year to year.
So I used to write a lot — and I mean a lot — about everything, most of which had absolutely nothing “to do with school”. I wrote poems, short stories, long stories, book reviews, essays on science and technology and politics and religion — I wrote down my thoughts on pretty much everything and anything. I think this was the one aspect of the gifted program in elementary school that had really stuck with me through high school.
In high school, my parents began to really attack me for my writings. Actually, they attacked me for a lot of things, including reading, holding tutorials and organising study sessions for my classmates, founding the school’s literary magazine, being the captain of the school’s mathematics and computer science teams, and going out and socialising. But since I am writing now about my writer’s block, I will restrict myself to their attacks on my writings.
There were two topics that I wrote about in particular which especially earned my parents’ ire, namely, science and religion. My science teachers recognised how far ahead I was of my classmates, and so they encouraged me to begin studying at a level more appropriate to university students. They recommended books (both popular books and textbooks), magazines, journals, and articles to me, which I would read and discuss with them. I also started visiting the University of Toronto’s Erindale (Mississauga) campus and spending a lot of them there, meeting with and talking to people. So I had a pretty good idea at the time of what sorts of ideas were being discussed at the university level when it came to computer science and physics, which were my primary scientific interests.
My interest in science, and the actions that I undertook to learn about various scientific topics and to promote interest in them (as well as in science in general), eventually led to my parents locking me out of the house and threatening to disown me if I continued with my studies. I will tell the full story of how my parents persecuted me for my interest in science later. But I think that the main cause of my writer’s block, as it pertains to my current inability to write anything related to science, and especially to quantum computing, is the fact that my father did everything he could to prevent me from writing my first scientific papers when I was in high school — papers on the very same topics that I am now required to write about to complete a Ph.D. degree.
My father insisted when I was in high school that I cease to write about the physics of computation, on the grounds that I was wasting my time and diminishing my chances of getting into university and graduate school. When I refused to stop despite his harassment, he first began to scream at me whenever he caught me writing scientific papers at home, and then he began to hit me. I continued writing, but elsewhere — at the high school, at the university, at a friend’s home. He then forbid me from visiting the university or my friends, so I just snuck out at night or when I knew he would not be home. This culminated in my being locked out of the house after going to the university library late one night — I came home to find the door locked and the handle of the screen door tied to the door frame with twine. But even this did not deter me — I only made sure not to get caught again. I only finally conceded defeat after my parents threatened not only to disown me, but to disallow my younger brother from attending university, if I did not do as they demanded.
Because of the punishments and threats from my parents, I stopped writing about the physics of computation at the end of high school. And now that I am in the Ph.D. program in computer science — which my father insisted I would never get into if I continued to write about the physics of computation — I am supposed to write a research proposal on the physics of computation.
I just couldn’t do it. All I could think about, every time I sat down to write, was how I could have completed this more than a decade ago, if only I had run away from home as a teenager. To make things worse, after I entered the Ph.D. program, my father kept nagging me for being too “slow” in starting to write my thesis — the very same thesis that I would have been working on over a decade ago if he hadn’t beaten me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for writing. The way I see it is this: he can either beat me and lock me out of the house for writing what would have been my Ph.D. thesis, or he can pressure me to finish it faster — but he cannot do both. He is the very cause of the problem for which he placed the blame on me.
And this was a very common occurrence throughout my life — my parents would blame me, or people associated with me, for the very things for which they themselves were entirely and exclusively responsible. This will become very apparent as I continue my story.
It might seem like the above would be the main source of my writer’s block and my depression, but that is only a small part of it. Despite being unable to write about science, I continued to write about other subjects — and my parents continued to punish me for writing.
– davinci
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