Welcome
"They put me off at the wrong stop wen I was born," (Doug Schaff; MeToo!)
As a child I was the object of intrusive parental surveillance and control, later, the "prep" school. I was free to do what they let me do and I had to do what they made me do.
If I had had a second life on a planet in another galaxy that they did not know about they would not have done anything about it until they found out about it. They were relentless. They haircutted me each two weeks. What the barber did was not good enough for my mother, so she would make a few annoying extra snips herself when I was returned home by my father. And it even came to the point one time that she would have broken my neck to wash what little was left of the hair on my head under the kitchen faucet. Fortunately, my struggles were not strong enough for her to escalate to paralyze me from the neck down but it was not because she drew a line at breaking my neck, only that she did not have to do it to accomplish the hair washing.
They were relentless: They were MY PARENTS, period. Relentless does not describe it. Releitless means striving for something. They were in secure possession of absolute authority to do whatever they whimmed or otherwise decided to do to me. They wielded the power of Or else!.
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I grew [but not honorifically "up"...] in chronic bedrock fear of Or else!. I had no self-agency or self-worth. I was wholly dependent on people who cared about whatever they had been socially conditioned to care about but it wasn't me – just the observable bodily and behavioral manifestations of the object they had labelled: "Bradford Hubert Robert McCormick". Like a subatomic particle I had position and velocity. But it could have been worse: One of the two patients I had in the psychoanalytic training institute had had a mother who made him stand absolutely still and keep absolutely quiet for periods of over an hour. (Among other sequelae, he became a wife-beater.)
The net is that I have always feared become=ing destitute and dying in the middle of a road by being run over by a motor vehicle. A dead skunk in the middle of the road. And I did not expect to get my needs met. In the "prep" school, I came to the conclusion that because I was intelligent and did not do social behaviors like dancing, I would hever have sex, and what they had done to me had not given me the strength of harcter to enjoy bing a hermit. So I needed the people who hurt me. Being dead skunk in the middle of a road is better than what I once saw: a squirrel convulsing in the middle of the road because it had been only partly run over by a motor vehicle.
Invenit et fecit
