He said “I’ll guess we’ll never be the same”. I said no, I didn’t think they would. She said “it’s made all of us weird”. I said there’s nothing wrong with that.
When I am feeling good, and I was feeling good then, I constantly find people sharing things like that. I am an asshole a distressingly large percentage of the time (particularly as seen from other people’s perspectives), but I am also at times capable of genuine kindness, and gentleness. That is all my children saw most of the time, although I was unable to keep the asshole completely out of view, and they would not hesitate to get on my case about it.
I am still not warm. That is a growth area. I grew up in the frost, and it left a mark. Warmth requires, I think, a deep seated faith in people which I don’t have. That, or perhaps a deep seated faith in myself, and my own ability to generate positive emotions in conditions of darkness. There is more hope for me in that latter possibility, because I am unlikely to develop a faith in people any time soon. I do think most people instinctively try to do what is right most of the time, but I also think most of them are weak and stupid a distressingly high percentage of the time, and easily manipulated into damn near anything.
As Doris Lessing commented in one of the quotes I excerpted a week or so ago, your friends of today might easily be a part of a ravenous mob tomorrow. This is the zombie metaphor, or at least a part of it.
I am calming down, though, which is good.