I concede that some nasty experiences have been character building. .I reject the notion that suffering ennobles as a principle.
Perhaps the hardest thing for me to unlearn has been my family’s mythology***. By that I mean a whole bunch of unfounded claims and assumptions about how life is and the way it’s meant to be’ . The personal superstitions which came with the Irish catholicism were only the tip of the iceberg
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***I once looked up ‘dysfunctional family’. Fair dinkum , it was like some one had been watching my family from inside the house and taking notes, for years.