My parents have always worked very hard throughout my life to cut me off from people who inspired, encouraged, or helped me to make the most of myself. They attacked me for socialising with people who motivated me to do well in school and provided me with opportunities to practise many of the skills I would later need in university while I was still in high school. They discouraged, prevented, or forbid me from associating with people who supported me. They did everything that they could to deprive me of the intellectual cultural background shared by my future colleagues, and continually criticised me for being in the company of the kind of people that my teachers and my classmates’ parents were always trying to inspire their students and children, respectively, to become. But the fact is that throughout my life there has always been a perfect correlation between my productivity and my sociability, and my parents’ eradication of my enjoyment of the company of others led inevitably to the collapse of my ability to do any work whatsoever.
The only way for me to return to work was to complete my Research Proposal. I couldn’t write it, because every time I sat down to write all I could think about was how my father had beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for writing about essentially the same thing back in high school… » [Expand post] [Permalink]