My blog reader friends and acquaintances,
Sometimes, I wonder if I am human or just a human-like machine. I had social issues when my father moved us from the town I loved to a town more like a city and into a questionable neighborhood - not that it was bad for my ultimate view of people of many variations. Then he disappeared for twenty-five years, leaving my mom to raise me and my two brothers who were with us. It may have triggered the Anthropophobia and my struggle to socialize consistently. My salvation was most probably my becoming a singer-songwriter and using that sphere to interact with people (something like an anchor in a storm that keeps me from drifting too much). The music gave me the only genuine social connection to others, yet it had a downside: drugs and alcohol.
My experience with drugs was easy to abandon. It was the 1960s, and Mom alone was not up to dealing with anything like that. When my involvement with drugs became troublesome, I turned to the more tolerated chemical substance, alcohol. Under the effects of alcoholic beverages, I was a social creature. When not, I was a withdrawn, hermit-like being. It required many predicaments and unpleasant vexatiousness to illuminate my problem. It took more than a half-century to accept that I was an alcoholic. It took time to free myself from that malady, and now I have been free from alcoholism for more than a decade.
It is a fortunate thing because I need to be alert and focused on caring for my wife with ADA (Alzheimer's, Dementia, Aphasia). It is living alone with her that keeps me vigilant.
These days, all I see are memories of better times past, and my hope for a better future is growing dimmer every day.
Pixabay .com
Though I believe it is unlikely, I know another person can alter my steady decline.