Dear Justina:

You write so skillfully, with talent, clarity and insight, a delight to read.

You wrote: “I’m wondering if someone can see something I don’t”- after reading your post attentively, this is what I see:

1. For twenty years, during all of your Formative Years, those years of childhood, you lived in a domestic violence situation, in a home where you witnessed your mother abusing your father and your younger brother, and you suffered direct abuse from her as well. You wrote: “Mixing this with my highly sensitive personality bred anxiety and depression”-

-every child is highly sensitive and every child is severely affected by repeating violence/ abuse at home. As a young child you didn’t have a personality, you were still forming, there was no personality yet. If you lived in a calm, safe home, you would now be as calm as a human can be.

2. You wrote that your father has been your rock throughout your life. If he was a rock, he would have taken you and your younger brother out of that home of violence.

3. You wrote: “I have so much. So many others don’t…  I’m White and privileged compared to so many others”- it is not a privilege to spend your life so far in domestic violence. It is not a privilege to suffer from an “ever-lingering depression and anxiety”.

We live in a time when food is plentiful, a person from long ago would be shocked to take a walk in today’s supermarket, bamboozled. Taking a walk in Macy’s would also be shocking, the luxury. We do enjoy material luxury, being able to buy all kinds of food and clothes, some more than others but everyone is more privileged materially than people of long ago.

Problem is there is plenty of food and material things but also plenty of aggression; a scarcity of safety and love. We are under-privileged when it comes to what matters most. It is not much fun, is it, to be well fed but to suffer from an ever lingering depression and anxiety, is it.

Reading your story, I see an under-privileged person, not a privileged person.

4. We keep experiencing as adults, the childhood experience that we had. “I’m waiting for something bad to happen”- just as you did as a child. The reason that you keep waiting for something bad to happen is not because you are now more knowledgeable about world troubles and politics, but because as a child you were afraid of what your violent mother will do next.

I have more thoughts regarding your share, but will wait to your response to what I wrote so far.

anita