I Stopped Playing-Pretend (Role-Playing) When I Was About Eight Years Old

After that, I imagined, or fantasized what I wanted to--usually schemes of liberation, conquest or the creation of homosexual island-city-states, complete with suitably Adrianic architectural complexes, combining the essential features of Tivoli and Aladdin-and-his-genie's joint palace-building.  I acknowledged in a general way the necessity of the Sex for procreation, but hoped that, like Wonder Woman and her mothers and sisters, they might be confined to some Mysteriously Hidden Island, and the ghastly physicality of their impregnation handled by some sort of turkey baster.  I little realized what I was on to.  What I did not do, or wish to do, was role-play.  

Nor have I ever since.  Then, as now, I utterly disbelieved that: "All of us in our lives play certain social roles, and we all therefore are expected to behave in an appropriate manner.  In any company one can find a Leader, a Clown, and many other roles being enacted.  The choice of concrete roles and models of behavior is defined by the education one has received, the conditions prevailing in our lives, the society surrounding us, and finally [as if it were last of all] our personal preferences.  There is probably no 'ideal model of behavior,' through which one could achieve one's goals all of the time, but it should be interesting for anyone to increase his self-knowledge and to understand his good points and weakness, or even to change his model of behavior in a particular situation...In fact when we play a role we can always observe from the outside: who am I in everyday life?  Why have I chosen this role?  What would I like to change in myself and to what extent?...[R]ole games are of great importance for teenagers in their development of life-skills [?!] and the ability to function in any society or group...."  O horseshit, horseshit, horseshit.   

From that very tender age, I knew that I was no longer playing.  I had a firm sense of myself, and no wish to be playing any "social roles" whatsoever.  I determined, upon a Platonic Greek and Stoic Roman concept of responsibity for myself, not to bother at all about roles.  It was for that reason that when I grew slightly too old to be a Cub Scout, I refused point-blank to join the Boy Scouts , the issue being that I would not take the Boy Scout oath to do my "duty for God and Country." As for there not being "a [single] ideal model of behavior through which one could achieve one's goals all of the time"--I strongly suspected that in fact there was one; and when, at the age of twelve, I discovered Emily Post's Etiquette, I knew that I had found it--for what it was worth.   Not that I thought that, by knowing essentially all there was to know about how things, properly, are done, I would "achieve" anything, but that I never, ever again had the slightest doubt about how to behave.  The acid test, I suppose, was the six months I spent in Italy in 2001, getting along warmly and politely with everybody I met, of all classes and conditions, never feeling a moment's shyness or embarrassment.