I wrote another thing, few weeks back

[maribou]

It's pretty heavy going but I'm glad I wrote it.

http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/2016/06/16/introretrospective-ii-violence-family-and-loss/

Comments

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

I never would have guessed. You seem better adjusted than I am.

I'm glad you wrote this; it was obviously hard to do so. It could help somebody in need.

Woman runs away from potential trouble in Canada to the United States. Man bites dog. Film at 11:00. Good riddance to bad trash. That good part of him wasn't enough to prevent him from leaving a trail of human destruction.

[maribou]

Well, and it's pretty funny (at least to me) that he actually ILLEGALLY IMMIGRATED to the United States and then got deported back to Canada as part of the criminal proceedings .... I'd honestly much rather he was still stuck in a US prison than living in the same province as my family, the same place I grew up, but unfortunately I don't control the world.

The reason I seem so well adjusted is that I was trained to seem well adjusted in public pretty much from the time I was a baby. So much of my struggle has actually been letting those walls down, and embracing the parts of me that are "too crazy" for public consumption, in order to even be able to start to heal them and accept therapeutic help. It's absolutely a reflex for me to work as hard as possible to seem as reasonable, calm, and moving-in-the-right-vector as possible any time I feel even a tiny bit exposed. Or to display unrelated weakness / frivolousness / ebullience / etc to hide whatever I'm actually feeling.

Before all this happened, I could probably count the number of non-immediate-family who knew even a portion of how screwed up I am without running out of fingers. Hard to say since one of the things I used to do was dissociate from the knowledge that anybody knew any of it.

Thank you for reading, and for commenting.