Echoes from another time.
“You’re too sensitive.”
“I was just teasing!”
“You need to come out of your shell.”
“You spend too much time in your head.”
When I was young, adults labeled me with words like “shy” and “bookish” which didn’t sound bad but I was pretty sure they weren’t compliments. I had no such confusion with the schoolyard taunts of “pussy” and “faggot.”
These were the judgments pronounced upon me. They were the phrases that defined me. They were spoken so often, I believed them. I believed that I was defective, inferior. I believed that I was somehow less. Even with all my gifts–of concentration, of perseverance, in music, as an autodidact–I still felt that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t fit in, because I rarely spoke up, because I enjoyed solitary activities, because I preferred walking in the hills to traveling with the pack.
So, when a friend recommended Susan Cain’s sociological study, Quiet, I was intrigued.
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 