I was only PRACTICING to frighten others because I was too busy, too focussed on frightening myself because of my appearance: I made an impression, but it was always an impression without ANY expression! That was because I was always so white, so pale that I must have always seemed unhealthy. I kind of identified with any characters that I saw on TV that were aliens from other planets. My ghostly, ghastly (to me) appearance combined with my inner dark side may seem to be quite a dramatic story, but for me it was just my everyday existence.

My self esteem was as sparse as my eyebrows. My mom had little if any eyebrows, as well. She seemed to have a brow bone that took the place of eyebrows. She certainly did have loads of "back bone" though. She was musically gifted, a classical pianist, maybe a genius, but she kept taking lessons, even in her 80's, to improve! In retrospect, she might have been happier had she been like her more glamorous sisters, but we will never know because she died in 2000.

I might have, likewise, avoided all glamour existence, identity, etc., for an alternative "tom-boy" like existence, but for finding my eyebrows! As a result of adding to my sparse eyebrows, I have gained a new "eye identity"! Previously I was lacking in self confidence, so much so, that I felt that instead of belonging, I was quite alien, even to myself.

I used to attribute this "differentiation" to all kinds of bullying, abuses, etc. For instance, one of my earliest memories was of my mother saying, numerous times: "I wish I never had you" to me and my younger brother. I drank whatever was in the liquor cabinet at 10 years of age, when my parents would go out, and continued the drinking until I was about 50 years old.

I focused on whatever it took to just survive and, possibly, as a result of this focus on only surviving, I seemed to draw into my life all kinds of crises, especially "stormy" and unstable relationships, for the most part (an exception was approximately 15 years with the airlines, first as a stewardess with a small regional carrier, and then as a flight attendant (the job title having been upgraded) with a larger airline.

I was always just living, barely living at all, always living on almost the edge of existence. I was unable to focus on future existence, except as any future existence related to an existence of the mind, because education was always stressed in my family, so it made a strong impression on me.

Gradually, almost imperceptably, I began to extricate myself from what may have been an addiction to crisis. I began to become aware of how the crises of my childhood made up a kind of a practice identity that I believed was what I had to master in order TO survive at all. I BELIEVED CRISIS WAS LIFE ITSELF!

Then I believed for the longest time that I just HAD to make stability somehow come out of the chaos that was my childhood and familiy existence. Now I know that the ANXIETY OF AMBIGUITY can be a source of much creativity, innovation and pleasure, if it can be viewed as possibility, potentiality, instead of only the "dark (shameful ie, being the "black sheep of a family, etc.,) side" of life.

Now I know that kind of survival was wanting to hang onto a crisis identity, basically a family identity, even the despised black sheep identity, at any cost rather that risk choosing a powerful identity of my own making, namely "giving birth" to a family of oneself.

It took me a long time to take the, at first, baby steps needed to stop being the baby that my mother never wanted to grow up,to stop being an naive subject of my mother's manipulative social "engineering". She wanted the three of her children to remain under her emotional control, as if she could "play" her children like the notes on her piano.

It took many years of patiently, and sometimes impatiently, being resilient to get to know what I was missing: eyebrows! I am grateful that I "paid my dues" and had a RELATIVELY hard early, adult, etc., life, (who has an ABSOLUTELY hard life, after all if you at least survive) because I now can enjoy the little things in life, like the basics in life.

I am finally able to take QUALITY OF LIFE ISSUES less seriously (perhaps I still take life and death issues too seriously, who knows?) This MAY be because I found my lost sense of humor. I'm trying to make my work be the play I missed out on, due to a childhood, etc., taken too seriously.