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Being a (Step) Parent

I was talking with a friend on the phone today. A person that I have not spoken to in a few years. We used to talk on a regular basis and then life happened and we drifted in different directions. Nothing bad. We just stopped talking. And he was talking about being married now, which I had known about, and being a Step Father in a blended family, which I had also known about and had not really stuck in my head. And as he is talking about this, especially around Christmas and other Holidays when everyone wants to celebrate with this child, I was also hearing the Joy and Pride that he took in being a Positive Role Model for this child. As he was talking I was reflecting back on my growing up in a blended family like that, with a Step Father, with family that was not biologically related to me, and reflecting on my very different experience. I have written enough about my growing up life in other places for you all to know what I am talking about. A brief summary, it was very different fr
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When People Care

 When I was young I felt like nobody cared about me. I was totally wrapped inside my head and really felt like I was alone. That nobody cared if I lived or died. And this was a really interesting dichotomy. I knew that people in my family cared for me, yet I never felt like it. And because of many different things going on within the family it was easy to live in the world of "No one cares" and "I may as well be dead". And that was the world that I lived in for a long time. It was a very lonely world. A very empty world. And then, I began to learn how to be human. I began to unlearn  being self centered and began to learn how to care about others, to empathize, to like myself and others. I still have a long way to go on all of those. I cannot practice any of these things any where near as well as I can discuss them. It is an ongoing, and very Human, journey. And I began to really feel like there are people in this world who care about me. About me as me and me as a
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When Your Sense of Injury Get's Hijacked

 September Eleventh Two Thousand and One. We all know what happened that day. And after, as the information about the people who had done those acts of terror came out, I made myself very unpopular in some circles. For I began stating, "I understand those guys". Because I did. And still do. When I was younger I had a very well developed sense of Injury. I had hurts. And they were legitimate. Not made up. However, the wrongness in them was that I held on to them long, long after the fact. I lived inside my hurts and never let them go. As a friend of mine once said, "I took good care of them. Fed them. Burped them. Changed their diapers. Made sure they could grow good and strong". And, for me, those hurts justified a lot of really bad behavior on my part. Later on in life I began the ongoing process of becoming human. And one of the biggest things that I had/still have to do is check my sense of injury. And I saw, and still see, how easy it would have been in that tim
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R.O.I.

 = Return On Investment The above term is a Financial slash Capitalistic term. What it means is the amount that is made when investing in something. When some one says that "It has a large ROI" that is what they are talking about. And for many years that is how I saw it. There never seemed to be any reason to expand what it was talking about at all. Pretty straight forward and in no need of being anything else. Right? Possibly not. Let me explain. Just recently I was contemplating about the end of relationships, all of them, not just romantic ones, and wondering why some of us have such a hard time letting go of relationships when the time has come to let it go. I have held on to relationships in my life long after they have actually hit the expiration date. And I know a lot of other people who have done this as well. I suspect that if everyone took an honest look into their lives that at least Ninety Five percent of the Human Race would be able to spot a relationship that th
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True Insanity

 For many years I was in denial of many things. One of the biggest was in my drug use and the insanity surrounding it. Until the very end I could not see the insanity that was my life. And when I did it started with a problem with a particular substance. That was so visible that it masked so much of the rest of my life. I had spent my life trying to change how I felt at any given moment. I never, ever, wanted to be me. As I say, and is sadly true, I always wanted to be someone else, somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else. I never wanted to be where my feet were. I also was experiencing Mental Health issues from a young age. Depression was already a part of my life and suicidal ideation was already a part of my life. In those days it was just not something people talked about so I never knew that this was not good or something that could be addressed. And that I was not the only one in the world who experienced these things. Being Alone was just the way it was I thought
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What Am I Looking For?

 For so much of my life I went through life seeing all of the negativity, seeing only wrong. And it was a crazy thing. And it produced so much negativity from myself and I spread it out into the world. And this is despite the fact that I looked at and experienced a lot of positive things in this world. I have been a Star Trek fan pretty much all of my life. First found it when I was nine years old and became an avid experiencer of it. And Star Trek is a very Hopeful and Forward Looking way of seeing the future. I truly believe that any hope that I have for the future survived to today because of that show. I also read a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy stuff. And it was, mostly, very forward looking and hopeful stuff. I could give you more examples and I won't. I think that you are intelligent enough to get the idea. And the reason that I was so negative in my outlook and always looking for the negative in life was I was locked into resenting a past that did not really exist. I h
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Emotional Wallow

 When I was young I learned how to not feel. Except for Rage and Self Pity. That, however, came later. I learned how to present an appearance of feeling. Or not feeling. Depending on what the situation called for. I had no idea what I was ever really feeling. I became a great, even Oscar worthy at times, Actor. I fooled everybody in the world. Especially myself. And there were times when things would happen that would show me up in front of others and I would, very involuntarily, feel shame, guilt, or anger. And then I would get mad at whoever. Sometimes I showed that I was mad. Most times I did not. For example, there was a time when I was twenty six years old and I was, very briefly, dating this young lady at U-Mass Amherst who was in the beginning of her Senior Year. I was telling her one day about a period that I spent homeless in Toronto Ontario when I was sixteen to seventeen years old. She listened to me tell the tale and then she looked at me and said, "You really like to
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