Note: Long Reading Ahead

[DayEnder]

I am the third-born of four children (two girls, then two boys) in a family that emigrated in two sets in the late 1980s and the early 1990s from Africa. Throughout my life I have never so much as kissed a girl, I have never been good at sports and I have always been something of an "oddball." I have had increasingly racing thoughts, I am extremely irritable (with the slightest real or imagined injustices against me triggering days- or weeks-long brooding and sulking) and I have the crassest sexual fantasies and also absurd fantasies of other sorts (improbable or impossible personal affluence, improbable or unwise social activism, non-feasible transportation infrastructure, etc.).

 

Aside from occasionally going after especially depraved, "scat sex" pornography, I have developed genuinely troublesome sexual acts (the voyeuristic kind), which of course was part of the reason that I lost my only long-held job back in 2002 after ninety-four months, low-paying though the part-time job was. I also have terrible habits (talking loudly and protractedly to myself in one room or another, outrageous "bedtimes," inglorious hygiene and so on).

 

Over the years I have been brainstorming just what is it about me that keeps me as My Own Worst Enemy. I have diagnosed myself variously as schizophrenic (latent or residual), as a schizoid personality, as a passive-aggressive personality and as a schizotypal personality. This past summer (maybe June, maybe July), I started to uneasily suspect that my woes are due to another affliction: Klinefelter's syndrome. This is a congenital disorder affecting only males and characterized by a chromosomal aberration. Manifestations of the disorder might be a characteristically large, top-angular forehead, gynecomastia (an effeminate chest), microorchidism (undersized testicles), azoospermia (male sterility), chordee (a penis that abnormally curves down or sideways when erect) and unusually long legs. I know that I have the unsavoury forehead, the effeminate chest, the not-huge gonads and the chordee. I also all too obviously have the cognitive impairment that many Klinefelter's individuals are afflicted with and I suspect that I, too, am azoospermic.

 

I need to get checked up by a competent geneticist or endocrinologist to confirm (or allay) my agonizing suspicions...on the one hand. On the other hand, our family is Roman Catholic (except for my father, a born-and-raised Anglican -- God rest his soul). My brother and I were confirmed as Catholics in Easter 2007 (more than seventeen years after being controversially baptized as Anglicans in late 1989). We pray the Holy Rosary and many other prayers every single day and we attend faith-healing Mass several times a year. Yes, I have often feared or bitterly felt that such congregations are partly meant to spotlight any and all doubters and entrenched sinners in their midst. I mean, who can I convince that endless awareness of my troubled and undiagnosed state might be getting in the way of properly worshipping God through Christ?

 

There is the issue of cost, especially for a protractedly jobless, single, childless expired-visa man well into his thirties. What charity care will I ever qualify for (again, mindful of my immigration status)? As can be imagined, thorough chromosomal analysis in the form of a is a labour- and cost-intensive procedure costing hundreds of dollars -- hundreds more than I can provide anytime soon. By the way, in late November 2008 I joined a Klinefelter's syndrome online support group, while still being undiagnosed. I am not sure if I remember in that forum any e-mails written by the patients themselves (ALL of them diagnosed) where the individual confided any statements about zero motivation for essential or worthwhile things...the sort of listlessness that has engulfed me for however many years. Yet there I was (and here I am), still undiagnosed and ever so chatty about almost every real and imagined failing of mine ("E-mail courage," I guess).

 

I fear nightmarish repercussions if I were daring enough (or fool enough) to go and get tested without my family's explicit permission. I keep imagining being hounded by the questioning and commentary of others ("WHY didn't you tell anyone first?!" "Trying to get away with everything from craving porn' to harboured grudges, eh?"). I honestly cannot confidently say whether or not I will use any mental-disorder diagnosis -- Klinefelter's or otherwise -- as an excuse for everything from villainy on my former job to sheer gluttony. I have repeatedly imagined my mother, during any hypothetical "revelation," abruptly or calmly getting up and, with a stony or placid look on her face, walking out of that room without a word -- and then I feel tormentingly obligated to chase after her and beg her to not disown me over the apparent betrayal (we DO have immigrant relatives and immigrant acquaintances who may mock us intensely). Oh, this sort of testing should have been done years or decades ago! Then there’d be little or no suspicion as to my sincerity while we do vital things like pray – if, of course, I would have ended up diagnosed.

 

And I wouldn't be some non-arrested sex offender yet to be horrifyingly exposed to his family!