I use music and many other things as a balm on my soul. I seem to be pained from deep down. It's a pain which is semi-constant, varying in degrees. The pleasurable feelings I have been recalling from childhood must also be counterbalanced by painful ones. That would also support the maxim about not feeling one without the other. Of course as an adult, I have a third option of feeling nothing. Or rather, always self-medicating, applying the various balms available to me. They are distractions.

So, about the pain...

If I was happy and warm being in bed with my parents, I was unhappy when I had nightmares. I was unhappy when kids at school ridiculed and excluded me. To tell you the truth, I don't really want to know what made me unhappy. I don't want to remember in detail nasty feelings of pain and humiliation. Unfortunately the choice is that or running for the rest of my life.

I wrote a journal about what were the negative experiences in my life. Remember? Must I continue to rehash them?

I definitely have an odd relationship with perfection. I jut back and forth between seeing it everywhere and seeing it nowhere. Between not caring about having it and accepting nothing less. Very jarring. It seems to stem from the fact that I still see Mom and Dad and probably my siblings, too, as the perfect people that no one is.

I never outgrew the idea that love is always about feeling unconditionally happy and nurtured. I cannot see the good for the good and the bad for the bad.

Am I just a naive bastard? A naive boy? As I've noted, I remember feeling unconditional love in our household, as well as other relatives' households. I keep my eye open to that sentiment to this day. Is it a feeling which is not appropriate for equal relationships? Equal partnerships? Am I taking it a bit too far?

So I am perpetually comparing this to that. But I don't realize what I am doing. So there is no way to address it. But it undermines everything. And I mean everything. Either directly or by means of avoidance.

If I do something other than play the cello, I am questioning the wisdom of one of my parents. Unbelievable. So not only do I love them unconditionally, but I also fear them unconditionally. There is the disturbing aspect to this.

Everything becomes a cliche. Everything already is a cliche. Would you rather be a self-aware cliche or an oblivious one?

I refuse to value myself, even just enough for basic tending to my needs. I have severe confidence, self-love issues. So isn't it safe to say I would be hypocritical to accuse someone else of a more harmful version of the same thing? At least in anything other than a compassionate way?

I seem to have a terrible time with honesty. It eludes me when I long for it. I spend much of my time dancing around the truth. Or else I am ridiculously blunt. It's one extreme or another. I suspect I was taught this propensity.

Interesting that lying was the one sin in our house that merited punishment. Is that to say that honesty could be forced into you? Maybe lying was an attempt at a different sort of truth-telling. One that tended to be overlooked or squelched.

I am left with a great deal of confusion regarding how to negotiate honesty in my life. Where does it come from, within or without? How do you know if you're lying or being secretive? Stretching the truth might be between the two. Or exaggerating or filtering out elements of the total picture. It's one thing to have some level of privacy, and another to shun truths from yourself. To suppress your own knowledge and experience from yourself doesn't seem to help anyone. Least of all myself.

What made me so vulnerable in college? What makes me vulnerable now, to this day? What makes me weak, powerless to think my own thoughts and take my own steps? Isn't there a reason why I am always second-guessing myself?

I am now coming to know the reasons. But should I tell you, o reader? Can I actually be forthcoming, if only here in this odd un-place? I would like someone to know. This seems safe on the surface.

Is it possible I have been beaten down into submission all along the way? But, of course, always with a smile, or a candy, or a dollar bill. Not in the more obviously harmful ways I was later exposed to and was by then defenseless against. Isn't it time I told the story of how I came to be such that I am? How I ended up impotent. And speechless. And rich with melancholy.

Nothing quite like ringing the doorbell at their homes. I remember it vividly. It got to be my honor when I was big enough. Then their embrace. Ahh. Simple joys. As simple as being alive. That's what family means to me - some of the deepest joys I have ever known. I remember hearing about unconditional love later on. It seemed utterly redundant. I never knew another kind.

As far as I knew, all the other stuff were the inconsequential details. The soup, the candy, the music, the cards, the bed, the couch and table. They were all awash in the warmth of love around and inside me. Each relative was a new chance to experience these feelings, in their own unique flavor. I was spoiled, insofar as I was granted such affectionate abundance.