I have been doing a lot of thinking lately and have come to realise that I have been here long enough to be able to look at the other self who flew in here as being someone else entirely. To look at myself from the outside as it were. Not that I’ve come to any great understanding but I think that my writing about ’looking down on the world from Mount Olympus’ rather sums things up. It’s not that I felt any superiority to the world in general as might at first appear but rather the opposite. I could not seem to deal with people in the sense of personal relationships or even in casual terms. I had need to get off by myself: to be at the very least at arm’s length. I was a loner not from choice but from the conviction of my inadequacy. If anybody got too close they must see through me: that I was a nothing.
And that conviction made no sense and still doesn’t. As an infant I was confident, perhaps too confident, at age four running messages to the local store entirely alone and insisting on service by the owner himself. No-one else would do. So what changed things?
School perhaps? I did well enough scholastically but could not always cope in other ways. From my earliest years, the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments had been firmly ingrained in me by our religious mother. Unfortunately, most of the world while paying lip-service doesn’t operate on those principles which tends to put those who do at a disadvantage. I was to find that even before their school years many of my peers had learned to be devious and were skilled at manipulating adults. Even now I cannot lie and I was to find constantly that someone else’s lie was far more believable than my sad truth and that teachers could be less than just. A bewildering situation for one who has been patterned to believe that things must always turn out well for one who tells the truth. I was frequently in trouble but Ruth, who had long since decided that outward appearance was far better than actual performance, sailed untroubled seas. More fool me?