You know, what both of you say is very interesting to me from a personal point. Minymo, I too believe in a higher power, although I must confess that I'm still fleshing out exactly what it is I believe. And as I've said, I do have an irrational fear of approaching people intimately. I can talk to them very comfortably, but when the conversation turns to personal subjects, I become uncomfortable very quickly, and back away from them. I suppose my greatest fear is of being ridiculed for something about me which I can't change. My father did that to me for most of my life, not to be mean, but because that was the way which he was raised. I once asked him why he had always been such a hard man, and his answer was that hard times make for hard people.

Sannah, I still feel like you have a pretty firm grasp on how your childhood can not only affect you as an adult, but do it without your realization. I was in my mid-twenties before it ever occurred to me that I was a part of a somewhat disfunctional family. I told my mother about it, and how before then I had just always assumed that our family was the kind which defined all others. Finding out differently was a very revealing revelation.

A lot of what you say is really quite relevant to me. I spent quite a while just thinking about your words, and it led me to a new revelation. I don't see myself as a child and myself as an adult being the same two people. There is my life before eighteen, and my life ever since. I see the younger me as a person that I have read a lot about, and is related to me. In a way I see him as a really long dream I once had. A dream so real it never goes away, but a dream nevertheless. I've always been bothered by the fact that there are long gaps in my memory as a boy. Whole years which I can't remember at all.

My parents were not abusive people, at least in the context of the area where we were raised. They were treated harshly as children, and came to believe that this was how children were raised. Neither of my grandparents ever had any use for me, and I never got to know them at all. But again, when I try to recall what little time I spent with them, it's more like remembering a TV show than something which I was part of. I don't know how realizing this really does me much good. It may have made me the way I am, but the clay has already hardened. I can't do much to reshape it. Right now I am forty-five years old, and history is repeating itself. Because of my illness, everyone who I expected to always be part of my life is turning me away instead. There's nothing I can do about it, and I'm learning to accept it. But if there's an easier way to learn, I would really like to know.

Anyway, I thank you both for really thinking about this, and telling me what you believe. It adds to the introspect I already had, and I'm not the kind of person to ignore another's viewpoint or thoughts. I guess you could say tha I'm pretty malleable most of the time. Thank you again, and I wish you both a lot of happy days and special times.

Idealist