11/11/2023 - 7:22 p.m.

I'm so happy I've found someone,.. Besides just feeling really great, it's also very "healing", That's the word I have for it. Little insecurities just fall away, melting away in the sunshine of a healthy relationship.

I'm not like other people, though. I started out my life in what seems more and more clearly to me, a truly dysfunctional family. You don't really realize it at the time, when you're all caught up in it. But it becomes pretty obvious when you're in a healthy relationship. (You're like, "What the hell? Why couldn't I have had this basic level of trust and support when I was first growing up?")

But I wanted to come here and write because I had a really big insight tonight. I mean, I wasn't particularly kind to the people around me when I was a teenager... Maybe no one is, but I've been telling myself that I wasn't exactly getting a lot of kindness from my older brother and sister either. So that's my excuse. But looking a little more closely, all us kids in my family had the same problem: that our parents were, just indisputably, distant. It could've been some "neurodiversity" thing with my dad, or my mom, or both of them -- maybe a high-IQ/low-empathy thing going on.

I mean, we also moved a bunch of times. But beyond that, then you've also got these children living in the shadow of these oddly detached parents. At some point I realized my siblings were probably not any more happy about the state of things than I was. So more importantly, whatever "unkindness" rolled downhill to me probably started, at least in part, with their unhappiness at our parents.

But now we reached the real insight. I mean, I've met my father's mother (and my mother's father). Not particularly warm peoiple. So just imagine what their childhoods were like. Saddled with their own detached parents -- with whatever extra economic challenges they faced in those long-ago decades. And suddenly, I had a horrifying thought...

That when they grew up -- and got married -- they still never really got over it.

They were still trapped in these unhappy roles, from their own unhappy dysfunctional families. Yes, they didn't "have it to give it" for me -- having grown up without enough nurturing, they just didn't know what that looked like. But I kind of just felt bad for them. Because if they really didn't have it to give, then doesn't that imply... that they never really ever got it for themselves. Not as kids. But also never healing up enough as grownups so they'd at least have it to give to their own children.

And that's sad. Just to imagine it gives me this dropping feeling inside.

Here's a happy ending, just to end this entry on a high note. Not my happy ending, but still, a happy ending -- that I saw on a TV show.

It was an old episode of Route 66. Tuesday Weld had returned to the town where she grew up, just to call out her mother for the terrible childhood experience she'd endured. The two guys with the Corvette try to tell her that she should give up her thirst for some vindication, just to move on with her life. So the next morning, she does. Says her piece in private, but then adds that she doesn't care any more; she doesn't need anything. And that she is going to just move on with the rest of her life.

And the episode ends with her driving off into the sunset with those two young guys with the Corvette.

The wind is blowing through her hair.

And she's got a big smile on her face.