Posted by Sigismund on December 29, 2008, at 17:48:29
It wasn't till I moved (cleared) out of home that I ever had a room of my own.
The lack of privacy extended beyond that because of my parents' circumstances.
There were *always* people (non family members) in the house, in the garden, people you knew but more often people you didn't, people who knew you whom you didn't know.
There was actually no (enclosed) place that could have been described as one's own.
Which is not to say one could not be on one's own, because it was the country and there was, to an extent, no one there.
OTOH, it could be entertaining, like some big circus...the cook drinking all the lemon essence and taking to some enemy with a knife in the night and leaving early next morning; the men who drank until the sh*t their beds, and were carted off to hospital to dry out while the next cook cleaned everything up and pretended nothing had happened.Anyway, this has given me a life long reserve; a reluctance to initiate contact IRL, and an extreme difficulty with social occasions, ameliorated only by drug and alcohol (abuse or not, take your pick), apart from one on one interactions.
That's all.
It's no big deal for me now.
But I can see in retrospect how the circumstances of my childhood made me the way I am.
poster:Sigismund
thread:871325
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20081219/msgs/871325.html