How Did I Get Here?

I've made a change to comment postings on my blog.  There won't be a change in the way you post your comments, but they won't appear until I approve them.  Please be assured that I welcome your comments, and I will publish them, but advertisements have started appearing on my blog, and I do not want those cluttering up my site.  So, please, continue to post your comments!  I really appreciate them.

Queenie asks what triggered my escaping into a fantasy world as a child.  Now, that's an interesting question.  Of course, fantasy play is a part of childhood.  Playing dress-up, playing mommy, pretending to be a princess or a movie star, and day-dreaming, are all parts of childhood play.  But I crossed the line somewhere, using fantasy to escape from reality.  To answer how that happened is difficult.  I am looking back at my childhood through the filters of my whole life.  That will color how I remember things.  And our memories are remarkably unreliable.  We can create false memories that are as vivid and real as actual events.  That being said, I will try to answer the question.  Queenie, you can be valuable here.  What do you remember about me as a child?  You might have a totally different take on things.

One thing that I've wondered about is the impact of not having corrective eyeglasses until I was in the second grade.  Not being able to see the world around very well until I was 7 or 8 years old could have increased my tendency to live an interior life.  And how did that impact my skills at social interactions?  Did I miss visual clues like facial expressions and body language because people were too blurry for me to see them?  There were times when it seemed as though Mama would explode in anger at me out of the blue.  I never knew when that might happen.  Maybe I couldn't see the warnings signs that might have clued me in.  She and I had a difficult relationship at best.  I remember three times in my life when there I felt some tenderness from her.  Once, she was taking me to the doctor.  I didn't want to go, and I was crying.  She petted me on the leg and told me the doctor would make me well.  And when I told her that I was getting a divorce, she asked me if I wanted to talk and listened to what I had to say.  Finally, when she was dying, I was brushing her hair, and she looked lovingly at me.  Other than those three times, I can't recall moments when we weren't battling with each other.

I am just now beginning to appreciate how much clutter and disorder affects my ability to function.  Maybe clutter around the house bugged me, and I dealt with that by living in a fantasy world. 

Maybe it's part of the way my brained was wired from birth.

Whatever the reasons, I started avoiding things that made me uncomfortable by withdrawing into another world.  It's still my first instinct, to withdraw either by living in a fantasy world or by self-medicating with food. 

Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one.  ~~Albert Einstein