I'm not sure what could be going unsaid here. The schizophrenic dad, absent mother, limited and erratic money for food, no adults to do the shopping and cooking, and mentions of programming blogs and escaping poverty all paint a clear picture. It's an open account and I don't feel the need to pry or ask questions about the exact conditions of the household, which were presumably not good, but I don't see anything vague.
Your comment, on the other hand, raises my curiosity in exactly the way that you seem to be against. I have no idea what you're trying to warn me not to do.
Early in the history of the thread it looked like there would be a turn toward the sort of "Why didn't he just...?" questions that often tend to arise. They're not more useful in this context than any other, and it was that waste of effort on points uselessly missed that I sought to deter.
Ooh, now I finally understand what kind of thing one would want to avoid. The original comment could perhaps have been more concrete by saying something like (for stupid, privileged people like me)
> People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity [for them to ask "why don't you just ..."].
Skimmed a dozen sub-replies that were sorted above this but now I finally get it
Well, I've never pretended I don't also join these discussions to learn. Thanks for helping that happen!
Bad enough to have been made to learn a lot of things most people never get close to knowing. Explaining some of that knowledge so those people don't need to go through it to get the benefit isn't actually harder, but it can feel that way. It isn't really a case of not being fairly met in the middle, but it can feel that way easily too.
One other note: I've intentionally not used the language of privilege, and I did not call you stupid. If you're anything I'm not in this connection, it's fortunate, and that's not blameworthy nor something I would ever hope to see change.
Indeed the entire point of trying to talk about it at all lies in the hope of making it possible to understand some things about what going through hell can do to a person, without needing to find out firsthand.
Prose seems like an easier medium than the less overt and direct forms of art where such matters are more often openly discussed. I begin to imagine I haven't simplified the task as much as I thought, though, by this assumption.
On that basis I can also recommend Strange New Worlds s2e9 "Under the Cloak of War," which is the most nuanced and honest discussion of the experience of past trauma I think I've ever seen on TV. That it looks up front like a war story is a metaphor that pays off in the last act with a pane of frosted glass. Read it knowing that, and maybe I don't need to say anything else at all.
Your comment, on the other hand, raises my curiosity in exactly the way that you seem to be against. I have no idea what you're trying to warn me not to do.