Encouragement from Non Family Members

I just loved reading this! It made me not feel so lost and alone in this world, despite all of the changes that are going on within and externally..."She's all of us who have felt marginalized by society, who have come from chaotic or stifled families, walking around on eggshells even as small children thinking we were shit. We failed to redeem our patents' lives, failed to fulfill their expectations. We got the bad message in our families, we got it from magazines and TV, we got it at school, from children, and from home-work that revealed we either weren't up to it or were teachers' pets, kissing ass. You couldn't win for losing. It was like the carnival, where you have to be tall enough for the ride, and you aren't yet; and then you're too tall-you missed it! 

All it takes is one safe person to listen, to hear, to noodle us to start over and not to give up. My safe person was Loretta. I was no longer so scared that my shame and inadequacy RS would be trumpeted, because she let me see hers, and we laughed. The truth was no more our in-adequacies than our personalities, our personas, our histories. As CS Lewis supposedly said, we don't have souls, we are souls: we have bodies." ~Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyways