Wasn't Me . . . Or Was It?

I am who I am and it took me a long time to figure out who I am but, man, is it great to know who I am.

A long time.

I think about my parents and how they did the best they could and how they passed along the best parts of themselves to me while also infecting me with their anger and resentments and paranoid depressions.  They did the best they could.  There's no tried and true manual for raising kids.  Every parent is kind of winging it, playing it by ear.   And - c'mon, let's get serious - I was a nightmare as a child and teenager and young adult.  Maybe not a nightmare - more of an unknowable mass of contradictions and bad choices and resistance to any and all help.  I cannot imagine how it must have been watching a talented, popular kid run his life into brick wall after brick wall.

The Statute of Limitations for blaming your parents expires when you hit thirty.  You're thirty!  Quit bitching about your parents for chrissake!

I received a lovely email from a high school classmate about a reunion coming up.  He and I were on the same basketball team and I was privileged to be a member of a group of athletes who shared a special bond and stayed close in the fifty years since we graduated.  In many ways my fondest memories of those years included this group of boys.  My friend shared a long story of gratitude about kindnesses that I gave him during this time.  It was heartfelt and made me feel great about myself . . .  but it never happened.  It was someone else he was writing about, at least partially.  I could recognize aspects of my personality in his memories to a certain degree - he was definitely talking about me - but the actions he mentioned weren't mine.  He was describing our relationship but in an out-of-whack Twilight Zone episode.  It makes me think about the fact that our minds are  composed of malleable plastic, rearranging memories in a fashion that makes us feel comfortable about how we have changed over the years.  I consider this when someone tells me something that may not be factually true, regarding it as a faulty memory rather than a deliberate lie.  And, shit, you know what?  Maybe that stuff really did happen and I'm in the one having a brain fart.  "Euphoric Recall" we call it in AA where we sanitize the disaster of our lives, remembering the good and erasing the bad.