Dear Nekoshema:

You are welcome and thank you for your kind words.

“my mom used to tell my sister and I the danger of forums, how any tiny piece of information would be used against us..”- don’t you wish she made sure that she was not a danger to you and to your sister?

You wrote that you feel “so safe and loved” with your fiancé, that the two of you are “rather silly and joke around a lot”, you don’t argue, and you are “the mess in the relationship and he’s this calm support”. Sometimes he needs your comfort and you give it to him. Here is a time relevant testimony: “Even during quarantine, we hear about how people are fighting and we’re just so confused about how you could be so annoyed by your partner”. You shared that he has a history of temp jobs, then a part time sales clerk job, and now he’s in school studying system analyst and network engineering.

Reads to me, Nekoshema, that you and your fiancé deserve a better social circle than the one you described!

“I can be somewhat chatty if I’m engaged in a topic, I think it’s the storyteller in me… The parenthesis thing.. it was a way to have two thoughts at once, one being a side note. I do that while talking too where my brain is jumping ahead and I just blurt out the conclusion”-

– it will be a great improvement for your thinking and your writing, as well as for the choices you make in life, if you take out the parenthesis thing, get rid of the side notes. Focus on the people worthy of your thoughts and attention, not on people who are not. Don’t get side tracked, jumping ahead and blurting words and actions.

In your profile you wrote: “When you’ve been to the depth of the darkness, as I have, you learn to appreciate the light”- write about that darkness and the light- none of that belongs in parentheses.

“I’m doing my best to heal and grow”- healing and growing is not done in parentheses.

“I aspire to be a writer”, and elsewhere you wrote: “I was thinking about trying my hand at nonfiction”- yes, good idea. Write about that darkness and light you mentioned, write calmly, don’t rush, getting side tracked, blurting out words and details that have nothing to do with your story of darkness and light.

anita