General Post #1 -- On Pain and Emancipation

I think this is an appropriate time to make a few comments about my blog.

Some of what I say might be surprising to those who don't know me very well.  Those who do know me know that I came from a terribly screwed up, dysfunctional family.  For years I felt a sense of personal guilt about it, as if I somehow were responsible for my father's mood swings or my mother's chronic melancholy, and for the near constant conflict between them and among my siblings and me. The institution that is generally regarded as the ultimate life-affirming institution -- the family -- was for me little more than misery's ambassador. Yes, I had suicidal ideations as I was growing up. Yes, I turned deeply introspective as a strategy for coping with impossible circumstances over which I had no control. Consequently, one of my goals in this blog is catharsis. This blog is almost as much about psychological space as it is about geographic space.  In the coming months, if I fulfill my personal goals, this blog will be at least partly therapeutic.

I wish to address the blog's content as per my #2 Nica post.  I am not, for starters, making light of suicide, though it may seem that I am.  I know it is a terrible thing to do.  I make light of it because now I can make light of it.  Similarly, I am not making light of mental illness. I understand -- more than most -- the misery it renders. The burden of living in a family scarred by mental illness is not a burden I carry any more, but yet it has influenced in one way or another almost every aspect of my life, from the relatively trivial to the exceedingly important. I don't like that; I am not proud of that, but at least its hold on me has eased to the point that I can make light of it.

I know I lean towards black, or gallows, humor.  From an early age I have used humor as a coping mechanism, and what came out was often sardonic, if not out-and-out darkish. I don't think it's hard to understand how I got that way.

My fascination with travel, likewise, began at an early age, and I realized, even when I was young, that it had something to do with getting to a better place.  But I am fully aware that the grass is not always greener on the other side. 

I have come to detest provincialism, people who go through life with blinders on (though, in a broader sense, we all do.)  It was provincialism -- and the sense of shame it engenders -- that eclipsed any possibility of my parents ever realistically dealing with the nightmare that was the family dynamics they had created.  It was provincialism -- and the boxed-in world view it engenders -- that led them to keep doing the same thing over and over based on the same dysfunctional template, and expecting different results.