I have lots of blog readers that don’t comment on WordPress, but frequently e-mail their thoughts. Though I will not quote any of them to protect their identities, the majority of them were people who had been keeping the same sorts of secrets- abuse that is so insidious that it took decades to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. The tone was full of admiration for my courage in speaking out, naming my truth, and stopping the protection she’s enjoyed for most of her life.

The messages that got to me the most were the ones telling me to keep being strong “for the rest of us.”

Yesterday would have been a good day to just breathe and not change my entire fucking life. But it wasn’t. It was the last day I would ever protect her in my entire life. No one has said anything negative. People have disagreed with me, sure, but always very respectfully, because they love me. Life doesn’t get any better than people able to disagree with you and love you all the way through it.

I am willing to entertain that I could have been wrong; I don’t think I was, but at the same time, I am not unfeeling enough not to be able to see the flip side of the coin. People have said that there might be unintended consequences for both of us, and for innocent people.

The “innocent people” line got to me. I gagged on those words, choking over them again and again. Are they innocent people to me when she is the one that deceived them? Is it my responsibility to clean up the mess she made? Are people unforgiving enough that they can’t see I’m writing this as a 36-year-old woman, so therefore the statute of limitations has already run out? That telling the truth after a quarter century is not to damage her, but to lift up all the people that tried to protect me and couldn’t because after I was lured toward her, I couldn’t see them anymore?

I’m reviewing the codes in another M&M, and my gut tells me that I absolutely did the right thing, because I did not set out to hurt her, only to free myself and the people that went through all of it with me, especially the ones I ran away from the hardest, because they loved me the most.

Warning: This material is not safe for children, and not safe for work, either, if you have people walking by your desk. That is fair warning. Proceed at your own risk. I can’t believe I’m even going to write about this, but it is an essential part of recovering from what I believe is psychosexual abuse. This is not for you if you have not been a victim yourself of something like it, but you’re invited for enlightenment purposes.

It is amazing how dark I could go after I met (name redacted, although there are days I wonder why, because rage). I am just now starting to believe that I am whole and healthy sexually because for a number of years, I tortured myself by feeling dirty. When I was 17 or 18, I let a woman walk all over me because I felt that I was already damaged goods. That’s because I could love my girlfriend beyond all measure *and* feel like calling out the wrong name during sex at the same time. It was special, and please read as much fucked up into special as possible.

There has never been a time in my life that I haven’t mentally felt her presence during sex until now, because it took me so long to realize that what I was doing was a byproduct of my childhood and not reality. My reality used to be that I couldn’t think about sex without bringing it back around to some conversation that we’d had or another, and even though she was parental in nature about it, I couldn’t react that way anymore. She’d already given me the journal. She’d already groomed me into being secretive about the time we spent alone. The information she was giving me completely shifted the way I viewed what she was telling me.

Over time, that feeling grew into the shame that almost killed me. She’d planted evidence that she wanted to make love, and then when she didn’t, it said to me in more ways than one how awful and dirty I was for even thinking about it. She engineered that reaction in me like she wanted it, and then slammed the door. What was I supposed to feel in that situation? In doing so much research about verbal abuse, my reaction was right on target. She hooked me into her every word, her every movement, her complete and total seduction.

It wasn’t sex that would have killed me. It would have been rumination from those moments forward, the one where the journal changed hands, from her and back. In some sense, I have not been able to breathe for 24 years, especially during sex, because it brings up all the emotional issues for me- the feeling that I’m disgusting, and I have been since I was 14 years old. I have carried that message into every sexual relationship I’ve entered, and there have been very few times in my life that I have been willing to take on the role of “top” because I generally want women to abuse me in bed. I want to feel as dirty as I am, and be punished for it egregiously. I have to live with this fucking mess every day of my life, and its tendrils are so entrenched that it’s taken years to start scraping at them with a razor and meat tenderizer.

Through me, every one of my sexual partners has had to deal with that dark energy, the kind that gnaws at you until your throat closes. This is not who I want to be, and I see it so clearly. Dana is owed more than that. I don’t want her to have to “deal with me” anymore. She’s been so patient and so kind through all of this, and at the same time, not as forgiving as I am. I have so many more positive memories than she does that the instinct to absolutely bite into her neck and rip off her head occurs more often than it does for me.

The consequences of her actions have fucked up every marriage, every sexual encounter, every afterglow where I ruminate on shame instead of enjoying aftershocks of a great orgasm. The horrible thing is that they’ve only been able to tell by the energy I exude, because it’s not on the surface where I can talk about it. It’s down deep in the valley of vulnerability, locked away in a velvet box that leaks.

Here’s another thing I’ve lied about through this whole process. She reads every word. She devours it. I know it, because she told me. She thinks I’m an excellent writer, and even after calling her out on her abuse, the only thing she said was “keep being true to yourself.” Being true to myself says that she has caused so much damage to me and my family that she should *have* to live with a Google tattoo. I want her to feel the hell I’ve been through over the past 24 years, because the lies have compounded into none of this ever happened and Leslie’s a mess.

Diane Syrcle.

The absolute worst part is that now my abuser isn’t allowed to tweak me, and at the same time, when I hit dark patches of grief, she’s the only one I want. The problem with that is you can’t get over someone and have them console you at the same time, whether you’re talking about romance or not. It could be your father, your mother, your partner.

When I go to the dark spaces in my grief, I still feel all the shame and embarrassment that’s compounded over the last quarter century, and that’s the part that will take the longest time. I’m embarrassed I kept barking up the wrong tree, but you have to believe that in the time and place that we were, it did not feel unwanted. It became so over time, because I think that we came to a fork in the road and we went different directions. On my end, it was that I really did need to be with someone my own age. With her, it was that she would have crossed a serious line morally, and was running in fear of it every time she looked at me when I was that age. The weird part is that she thought I never noticed. How could I not?

By the time I was 15 or 16, I didn’t look like a child anymore, and I recoil recalling every time I thought about how I would have seduced her into it if I’d ever had the chance. I am very persuasive when I want to be, and I would like to believe that I would have been way too hot to handle, while nerdy enough to know it’s not really true. My ego tells me that these were not wasted years, because I learned to be the husband/wife I wanted to be, just not with her. Our relationship sometimes had elements of longtime friendship/marriage, but one of those truly unequal ones where she tries on clothes and I hold the purse on the chairs they keep for those sorts of people.

And I could be totally full of bullshit, because maybe she never even thought about it and I *am* the crazy one. She just offered me enough information to pique my interest, and then walked away as if to say, “my work here is done.” It is a chaos that has eaten at me for years, because her natural instinct is to run away from the questions I have so that the only closure is the one I created for myself out of desperation because this was never going to get any better unless I tried to save myself instead of constantly caring about her more than I cared about myself, because it had been that way since 7th grade. I mean, who in her life had that much free time to pay attention than a 7th grader? We were secluded from the outside world. No one knew that we were talking until the phone bills came rolling in, and I was generally the one that got punished for being friends with her, while she never had to go through that for me. I literally sat at the mailbox every day for 4 years so that her letters wouldn’t get intercepted before I saw them. As I have mentioned before, she sent me flowers on my birthday during English at Clements, and three weeks later I was transferred into another class because my teacher had read the card- “love from the moms.” I hated my new English teacher, but I suffered through it. She never meant to hurt me, so I wasn’t bitter about it. She was trying to do something amazing that would make me feel good. I am just making the point that being friends with her was full of consequences she didn’t see or wouldn’t.

As I have said for many years, “there’s a lot of don’t want to in cain’t.”

The fact remains that when she moved, I was stuck at the church where everyone thought she was a child molester and had chosen me as the subject. I thought they were just being prejudiced because she was a lesbian, so I ran away from everyone that tried to get us apart. I lied and lied and lied and lied and lied…. and lied again and again. Protecting her reputation was more important than protecting my safety.

Which is the absolute worst part. My soul is fucked up, and I still have people saying “get over it.”

Kiss my motherfucking ass.

I woke up this morning grateful for everyone and everything. That’s because I went to sleep having read several e-mails from people who’d read “Advice Column Thursday: A Guide to Your Parents,” and wanted to thank me for it. I couldn’t have written it without having lived what I’ve lived, and therefore, even the negative parts have merit. It’s overwhelming to feel that much peace before showering.

I have learned more about how to deal with balance of power issues in the past year than I have in the last 20. Everything about setting boundaries resonates with me, especially in terms of those you love and respect the most. The people you respect the least aren’t deserved of that much attention.

I think I hit the nail on the head when I talked about children setting boundaries for parents not being in the natural order of things. I don’t have to have the kind of steel reserve with my own parents that some of my audience does, but I believe that my story with my abuser is what puts the child/parent relationship into perspective, the emphasis being on the connection from the child’s point of view.

Because I was at just the right age to be a child and a grown-up at the same time, I ran with it. You all know those kids… those first children with their “can-do” attitudes and willingness to run your program if you let them. I was a full-on search and rescue operation before I could drive.

She was a second child… a princess. She reminded me so much of my younger sister at times, because I am a natural peacemaker and she is a natural pain in the ass… more so because she knows it and knows you’ll let her get away with it because she’s the princess. I have walked through a lot of my life with an exasperated sigh having ended up with, on some level, four younger sisters instead of three. One was just taller and had more insurance.

I couldn’t love (name redacted) any more. I just couldn’t. There’s already no limit to the things I would do if she was in trouble and asked me for help. I would strangle anyone in my way.

But at the same time, because we grew up in a relationship where the balance of power was tilted toward her, it still makes my setting forth boundaries seem against the natural order of things, like a child with a parent. I realized that the natural order of things had shifted and I didn’t go with it.

Once I did, the whole world opened to me in ways I didn’t know were there. I am excited to see what’s on the road ahead, because I feel more free to explore now that I’ve made room for it.

Dear ACT,

My parents are Conservative Christians and I am a gay woman. They are coming to visit next month and will be staying with me and my partner. How should I deal with the elephant in the room that will come packed in their suitcases?

Thanks,

Liberal Daughter

This is such a universal problem. Just stick any old “X” into the “and I” half of the equation and suddenly everyone everywhere has stood in your shoes. Therefore, we might as well leave the gay alone and talk about what to do when your parents are over and *any* animals arrive.

So this is for all kids, everywhere, regarding anything that’s hard to talk about with your parents. You’re not going to like it, but it’s true.

Stop.

Stop trying, stop caring, stop ruminating, stop worrying, stop crying. If they haven’t fucking changed by now, they’re not going to. Spend the time you have left on this planet forgiving your parents for whatever they did to you, and let them go. This is not to say that you have to stop loving them, stop interacting with them, stop contact with them… it’s just that the balance has to look different in terms of the power of the relationship.

Children are not used to setting boundaries with their parents. It goes against the natural order of things. But what happens when you realize that the things they taught you are the things that hurt you? Setting up an emotional fence that they can’t get past is not for them. It’s for you.

I hate The Flash.

It’s the moment I see my abuser’s name in my Facebook news feed (greyed out b/c she’s blocked, so it doesn’t happen very often). My ears burn. My eyes water. If I don’t get up from my computer and *do something else* the rumination starts to eat me alive. Of course I’m curious where she is, what she’s doing, all that. But I’m doing the right thing by not. So why does it feel so shitty?

Because it is.

I believe that a roadmap of my grief over my first marriage and subsequent divorce would look something like an EKG… and for the first few months, it was more like a picture of atrial fib.

I keep reminding myself that grief is natural, that grief is a matter of time and time alone, that nothing I do will hurry it along. Those thoughts keep me from feeling quite so sick to my stomach whenever a thought of Kathleen washes across my mind, as if a solitary thought or picture is a betrayal to my new relationship.

In terms of grief, today has not been a high point. It started when I was looking for my friends in the Webshots community who hosted several parties for GLOBAL, the GLBT student group at University of Houston. There we were, Kathleen and me, shiny and smiling at 21. It was Valentine’s Day, and I was wearing my sister’s leopard print pants. My hair was the same color as Carrot Top’s. I struggled to remember the woman standing next to me in that moment. The many nights of jagged crying bouts over the injustice of her infidelities and the role I played in everything that led up to them had left me with precious few memories of what life was like before.

Later in the night, due to the string of thoughts I’d had since seeing that first picture, I couldn’t help myself. I went to the last URL I had for her and took a peek. It was an egregious error that could not be undone. Posted to the front page with glaring clarity were Kathleen and her new fiancee along with both sets of proud parents.

Injustice rose within me. The simple act of taking a family picture was a level of acceptance that I had never received, even though I loved them and even tried to like them most of the time. I could relate to Donna- a writer who escaped into the world of her romance novels because it was better than anything real life could cook up. And then there was Joe, a NASA engineer and realtor who spoke with a strong lateral emission lisp and pronounced the famous author “Jule Verness.” Overbearingly Catholic, Kathleen and I were allowed to show very little affection in front of them and they seemed shell-shocked by my spiky red hair and “I’m With the Band” t-shirt.

As time went by, we each began to get used to each other… with a few exceptions.

There was the memorable experience of me going up to the priest at St. B’s for communion, because back then I was naive and thought that all people needed and deserved communion… and a whole host of other uncomfortable moments that I’m sure will come to me if I sit here long enough.

But I’d rather talk about her shoes. Kat was wearing these open-toe sandals that just screamed, “I watch the 700 Club!” The Kathleen I know wouldn’t be caught dead in those fuckers, preferring instead to wear sneakers with everything.

And therein lies the rub.

THIS IS NOT THE KATHLEEN THAT I KNOW.

This is another one that to me, is painful and beautiful- worthy of uploading here. The setup here is that I’d been absolutely ignored after first agreeing to meet with me and my therapist. When I told her that I’d rather go to an Al-anon meeting (because of her first wife, not our families) so that we’d both be in an equal room without invading each other’s space, I must have scared her because I never really heard back, even though I would have checked out a different idea if she’d offered one.

This was written while Wi-Phi was in surgery, and I was just as fried as I have ever been in my life. The tone is urgent because I was wracked with anxiety because I’d told her that I needed a deadline to say “yes,” “no,” or “shut the hell up and don’t rush me.”

==========================

I asked you to meet my deadline so that I could have some proof that you would think highly enough of me to respect my wishes. When you didn’t respond, I knew that for whatever reason, you have not seen a single thing that is positive about working all of this out, even though you have said that you want to engage in my process and seemed to mean it for a day or so. I am tired of living in the box where I cannot emote. That every emotion is strung out into a series of reasons why I must not be feeling what I say I’m feeling.

Dana was trying to give you a book she found of classic American sheet music; when you didn’t respond to her, I realized that you might have thought I was trying to get to you through her. Nope, this wasn’t even my idea and I didn’t corner the market on hurting about this thing.

You need to challenge your own assumptions about me, because I come across a lot differently on the page than I do in person. For the last few years, you have only known my writing personality because I didn’t think I was strong enough to let you into my inner sanctum with the possibility of it being ripped to shreds. It is as if the pen (or keyboard) and paper is the blast proof zone. I can look at my own emotions without flinching because the landmines stay untripped.

I need you to challenge the thought that you are always big, you are always in charge, and when I try to assert dominance, it is not a slam against you. My thought process is “if I’m so star-spangled awesome, why don’t you want to elevate me?” I would hope you’d want me to feel like I had some power in the relationship. Because that’s what all relationships are- establishment of a soft constantly rolling hierarchy.

On Tuesday, I am going up to the top of Mt. Tabor around 7:00.

When Ellie and Quinn died, you sent me a note that said what you wanted and needed from me more than anything was to just sit there and be quiet next to you. Enjoy clove cigarettes and whiskey in the utter quiet without saying anything. Just. Be.

It is a different time and place, but I hope that you still want to sit next to me without saying anything. I’ve said enough for three lifetimes.

I would like you to join me, but that’s not a requirement. I figure, I can open the door to reconciliation, but I can’t make you walk through it. If you don’t show, I will sit there until I feel better, then I’ll pour the whiskey on the ground and walk away.

If you do show, my hope for this meeting is that absolutely nothing gets done. Like I said, I’ve written enough. I will sit there with my whiskey and know it’s a moment and shut the hell up.

===============
Epilogue
===============

…and in case you’re wondering, I sat on the bench with two shots’ worth of whiskey in the caldera of Mt. Tabor for about an hour. As promised, I poured one of them on the ground and walked away. Then, when I got home, I divided the shot into three parts. My Dana and my best friend shared it with me. It. Was. Perfect.

I don’t normally use this blog for correspondence to someone, but I loved this letter so much I thought it was worthy of sharing for posterity’s sake. I want this in my memoirs. This was written after I went to Al-Anon for the first time.

==============

I just realized that I know a piece of the puzzle that you don’t know, and that you’d probably like to. My sister, Steffi, was an attorney at a domestic violence shelter for many years, so her bookshelves are filled with thousands of dollars worth of self-help. Dana and I spent some time with her last summer in Sacramento.

I was asked to preach, and because of the Lectionary, I started reading about battered women and abuse. I went through Steffi’s library at length and read everything I could possibly read about battered women because I was looking for you, trying to find your emotional picture, so that I could figure out what the hell had happened to me over the last 24 years. I didn’t start the project by looking for you, but a book on verbal abuse held up so many red flags that I cried for weeks. You stifle my love for you by not letting it flow naturally. By damming it so that my emotions slap on you like waves and all you have to do is destroy the dam so that the tsunami doesn’t have time to materialize in the first place.

The missing piece of the puzzle for me was wondering how I could pull myself out of this relationship without your permission. It’s not that I couldn’t let you go, it’s that once you were gone, I still couldn’t take off the ring, you know? My interactions with you changed, but my behavior didn’t… a complete and total hallmark of verbal abuse. You also manage our connection so tightly that it’s strangling, and I didn’t know that wasn’t normal for a very long time. And by managing, I agree that it’s ok that you take up all the room in this relationship because that’s how we set this up. After 25 years, our relationship can’t handle some cracks and tears? Please.

Last night I lost about 400 lbs of emotional weight, and I feel lighter today than I have in weeks.

Before those books, my mental health was very unstable because the fact that I couldn’t NAME THE PROBLEM and it was going undiagnosed for years and years and years finally got to me. I realized how sick I was without even knowing it, so it kept compounding.

My first family didn’t drink at all. They had other flaws, but that wasn’t one of them. I say this to acknowledge that in raising me, everybody did the best they could do and I’m not bitter. I’m awesome.

You helped make me into a gorgeous woman, (name redacted). With your help, I’m a knockout. With your help, I learned how to get it done emotionally. With your help, I learned to love the banjo (that was a lie… releasing the shame).

There are two pictures in my mind that I want to leave you with today.

The first is the way the air electrified for me when you touched my hair because I knew that if you were touching my hair, then it was something really intimate… because anyone who tries to touch your hair has a fair shot of not bringing back a hand.

The second thing I want to leave with you is the most precious of my life, the most healing, and I’m sure it felt so friggin’ weird to you, but I have to explain now what I couldn’t explain then.

Years ago, Dana and I went to visit Steffi and the parents in California and we were literally scrambling for me to make it back for a meeting with you on time. I made it at, like, 5 of 7 and when I arrived, you were lying on the couch. I was so emotionally crispy that I couldn’t help it. I dove into you to get the scent of home, the feel of home.

(name redacted), when you hold me the way you do, it makes me remember why I moved here in the first place. That your body and your mind and your heart felt more like home to me than my mom’s, my dad’s, my girlfriend’s… Not until I met Dana did I meet the one which you called “the passion that will ignite my soul.” Those are my words for the moment when my center of gravity changed, so that we could break our first family connection… as I have done each time that I have been in serious relationships. The only time you become that center of gravity is when I’m so wrecked that I completely shut down and you’re the one I want. You’re the one I want when I’m hurting so bad that my soul is crushed into my 13-year-old behavior.

And this will never have anything to do with you unless you want it. and you’re going to have to want it, because we’re fucked up and I won’t be friends with you if you can’t show your crack and let some light in (That was a joke).

Welcome to what family looks like for me. I hope it’s dark, twisty, hilarious, and worth it.

Love,

Leslie

It’s my favorite song in the entire world, and I bawl like a baby every single time I hear it. I am sure there are other people that feel the same way, but I have a special connection to it. When I was nine and my sister was three, my mom and dad took my sister and me on a cruise. While on it, we had a talent show, and my three year old sister brought the house down by singing that song. People were engulfed in tears, including me. It’s one of the best memories of my life so far.

Today, it chokes me up that I left (name redacted) behind, and the song means even more. Today I remembered what I considered the best and my favorite memory of her, and I wished on the stars for her happiness.

We were on the waterfront, sitting together on a picnic. She was introducing me to someone, and she called me her best friend, out loud, right out there where everybody could hear it. I saw stars. I think on that memory and I blubber like a baby while “Somewhere Out There” plays in Lindsay’s three year old voice.

It is amazing to me how much grief allows me to let go by smiling all the way through it with happy tears.

I am not transitioning. It’s a line from “The Sword in the Stone.” I feel that I must use that as the first sentence if I’m going to use a title like that, because the excerpt on Facebook will freak people out and they’ll start calling before reading further. How do I know this? April Fool’s jokes. In one, I said that I was transitioning. In the other, I said I was pregnant. Both were fairly believable- my girlfriend at the time of the pregnancy prank said “I watched you have a period for three months and I still fell for it.” Let’s just say my writing can be very descriptive.

The reason that this entry is so titled is that it came to me when I was reading over my past entries to kind of evaluate where I am. In “The Wheat and the Weeds,” I explored the idea that I’d fallen in love with my abuser’s inner child, and the equal relationship ended when that child grew up and I was still a plain old teenager. It reminded me of the scene where Merlin turns both himself and Arthur into squirrels, and the lady squirrels find them incredibly alluring. The lady squirrel is still clinging to Arthur when he turns back into a boy, and she’s devastated, slinking off into the trees.

I was clinging to her inner child when she suddenly turned into an adult. Comparing that to a literal illustration helped me to understand my grief in a new way. In a sense, that is coping with grief in a nutshell… learning to understand the things that need to change so that you can process your loss in a positive way. My abuser has affected my art since we met, which has always been this type medium whether it was letters, e-mails, or starting blogs. It’s been a positive outlook even when there was only an audience of one.

Part of grieving has been learning to turn away from e-mailing her anyway, even when I knew there would be no response. It was never about her. It was always about me. I thought I might never know what would make her understand, what words would strike some sort of chord, so I wouldn’t shut up. I’m sure my level of bandwidth was really intense, but at the same time, there was a lifelong precedence for it.

Losing that urge to connect with her was the creation of a broader audience. My art didn’t have to be kept secret anymore, because I stopped caring about her reaction to my grief, because there wouldn’t be an end to it if I didn’t. It was like my body and soul finally said, “enough” in so small and still a voice that I knew I had to listen to it before I got knocked down again.

So I don’t e-mail anymore. It’s been a very long time- since I started writing for this blog in a disciplined way, so about a year. I think part of the reason that I’m still recording memories is that I’m terrified to lose them. They’re a part of me now, from the worst moment to the best. I never realized how unconditionally I could love someone until I met her, and even more since I’ve started thinking, really thinking about how my actions have influenced her in ways that I’ll never know, and finally don’t need to.

I am a squirrel, and she is a boy. This blog is just what I think when I’m wandering in the trees.

So I came back from living in the same game with my first wife to living the original game with my abuser, which I just put together right this minute and I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my fucking skin.

So, to pick up from where we left off…

Until (name redacted) started picking up her toys, I never realized how much she and my first wife resembled each other. They didn’t look anything physically alike, but they’d both been mentally groomed by an abuser to do all sorts of things that broke their psyches. In some ways, it was such a relief to figure that out, because any trickle of “what if” in my mind was no longer. Of course I’ve wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t moved at just the right time. What human wouldn’t? Seeing my first wife as having similar characteristics allowed me to see the full spectrum of what I would have taken on, and in some respects, already had. In my relationship with (name redacted), I had already given her so much, and in running post-mortem on my first marriage, I realized that  the what-if said this: I would have given <name redacted> more, and more and more and more and it still wouldn’t have been enough. Even when I change the circumstances, the resolution looks the same. In every case, the cognitive dissonance between her words and her actions leaves us at an absolute impasse.

It’s comforting to me there is no way that I can change the order of what happened, the timing, the age gap. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the more I realize things like this, I just become more Zen, rather than when I first met (name redacted) and called God a punk ass bitch to God’s face because I was so angry that God had put this woman in my path and made me too short to love her (well, I’m still short, but you know what I mean). Oh, God and I have gone 65,000 rounds on this one, because I can emotionally kick the shit out of God when I want to. I have somehow always known that in the silence is where God lives, and that even if I am kicking the shit out of air, there’s still resistance.

I had to pray through the realization yesterday that I married a pattern and not a person. I had to breathe, sit with it. Marrying my first wife was years and years ago, so I know that I’ve grown so much since then. But that doesn’t mean that realizing who I was isn’t triggering me into who I am. It’s like going back to college for the basics after 20 years, and then you get there and you realize you haven’t forgotten anything.