The Roots of Sexuality as a Latchkey Kid

Boredom becomes a great opportunity for a young boy to explore himself.

Strange things can happen when one becomes alone and bored. Creativity and ingenuity come to mind. But also the exploration of oneself.

Leo Tolstoy, who is regarded as one of the great authors of all time, once wrote…

“Boredom: the desire for desires”

I became a latchkey kid at the age of 9. Latchkey kids were those who came home from school having to spend the rest of the evening alone. My mom was working nights as a bartender then, while my dad had been gone for a couple of years after a divorce. I’d get home from school just as, or just after, my mom was leaving for work. She wouldn’t return until after midnight.

And by the time my mom returned home, I was already asleep. By the time I left for school, she was still asleep. By the I returned home, she was gone. Sometimes I stayed up waiting for her to return home, just to hug her and hear her voice. She’d through the door, see me still awake, and put on a look of disappointment.

“You go straight to bed!” she’d insist.

I got little interaction from her.

At my age of 9 years, my mom felt it was no longer necessary to hire a babysitter. Sometimes she had a boyfriend who would stay with me, but she went through several boyfriends, and more often than not, there wasn’t much in it for them to sacrifice their evening hours.

Being alone meant being bored. It’d only take an hour to finish homework, which left several more hours of nothing to do aside from watching television, and reading through our set of encyclopedias. TV dinners and bowls of ramen were my staples of nutrition.

Then I discovered nudity.

The idea of taking off my clothes and leaving them off somehow came into my head and I don’t exactly remember how. But I do remember rationalizing it, thinking that there’s no way I’d get into trouble. My mom would never find out. It started out by being naked inside the house all night long. Then I started going outside, and again, reasoned that drivers passing by wouldn’t know to look. And if anyone walked by, I could easily slip back into the house. I would challenge myself to remain outside naked for as long as possible without giving myself away.

I’d dared myself to venture further and further away from the house, trotting quickly behind a parked car, or ducking down behind a fence. I was patient in wating for traffic to pass by, I kept an eye out for pedestrians, bicyclists and skateboarders, and then scampered with excitement to the next hiding place. I often got a rush of adrenaline.

Now I was having fun.

But challenging myself this way was purely an intellectual exercise. I was thinking, plotting, strategizing, and becoming more proud of my achievements. I was no longer lonely or bored. I didn’t know it at the time, but exercising this intellect was a critical moment in my development.

My emotional side, however, withered without human interaction. Mom and dad weren’t around to nurture me. There was no one to love me, make me laugh, punish me, make me feel ashamed, or what have you. I remained entirely within myself, taking in external stimulus and using it to keep my mind working. I learned to nuture myself.

In a way, spending so much time alone was a positive because it gave me this sense of independence. It also fosters much of my creativity, which is good for a writer like me. But it’s also a negative in that I still struggle with interaction, I still feel a lot of anxiety in confrontation, and have a lot of trouble controlling my emotions.

My years as a latchkey kid went on for nearly two years until my mom met a boyfriend that moved in with us. Otherwise, the experience introduced a valuable concept to me that I continue to employ today. It’s that rationalizing through emotions opens the door to unlimited possibilities.

In other words, public nudity is an emotional distress for many, mainly from the feelings of fear, insecurity, vulnerability, embarrassment, etc. But if you can dissociate from your emotions, and address it from a purely intellectual point of view, you’ll realize there’s nothing holding you back. It allows you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. But shutting off your emotions is not an easy thing to master if you haven’t spent much time alone.

Today, I have no hesitation about removing my clothes in front of other people, as long as I know I’m not going to get in trouble for it, nor offend someone. I like to think that’s another positive characteristic, but who knows…