If you are looking for life advice, it’s best not to start with Zen. But if you are continuing your search, as I am, it’s a good next step. It helps to find a muse. Mine is DT Suzuki, a Zen philosopher and fellow lover of cats, and a man who has made the circuitous logic of his field a little more straightforward. He is long since deceased, but a museum has been built to honor his work in his hometown of Kanazawa, the same small Japanese city where I currently live and work.
I moved to Kanazawa last summer to begin a job as an English teacher. It sounds cliché (is cliché), but the transition was just as much about finding myself as it was about a career change. I had been a Peer Specialist in Massachusetts for the past three years, and had reached the point where my involvement in the community was doing me more harm than good. Too much banging my head against the wall and beating a dead horse and whatnot. Advocacy overload if you will.
More than that, I was unsatisfied with me. I’ve considered myself recovered for quite a few years now. Despite this minor feat, my identity continued to feel fractured. I was still missing a key puzzle piece that I had lost over half a lifetime ago.
And so I went looking for it at the DT Suzuki Museum. It’s a small square building, broken into three sections. The first is a rotating exhibition room (the pieces, not the room), the second a quiet library and reading area, and the third an outdoor contemplative space dominated by a shallow pool called the Water Mirror Garden. After a two-hour tour of the whole museum and a part-mimed conversation with the curator, I circled back to the library.
It was a hot day in early August, and my shorts stuck to the chair despite the air conditioning. On the wall to my left hung a large calligraphy tapestry. The picture painted on it was Suzuki’s interpretation of Sengai Gibon’s enigmatic Circle Triangle Square. DT Suzuki had been somewhat obsessed with it in the later stages of his life. I had a collection of Suzuki’s books in front of me on the table and was flipping through his Essays in Zen Buddhism. I was about to put it down when a passage near the end caught my eye. It was a small extrapolation on identity and the self from Seeing Traces of the Cow:
“He now knows that things, however multitudinous, are of one substance, and that the objective world is a reflection of the self.”
This sentence carried me from my chair and into the past. The nature of my identity has always bothered me. A diagnosis of Bipolar at the age of 14 will do that to you. I’ve never met a person who knows who they are, at least not an honest one, but most of us know what we are by a fairly early age. Regardless of the privileges or disadvantages that come with the labels, we have a fairly strong understanding that they exist. I didn’t suddenly wake up one morning in 7th grade to discover I was white. Although I did walk into my first crush in 2nd grade and realize I was straight. But even with sexuality lagging behind, it was something that came from me and that I understood fairly well (at least until puberty).
None of these identities came from at outside source. While I appreciated my mother’s support, I didn’t need her telling me I was a hockey player. I was rather proud of the fact. And I was the one that dragged her and my dad around from rink to rink in the first place. My English teachers all knew I was obsessed with (and competitive about) literature, but they weren’t informing me of the fact. My daily experiences with reading and living did that.
And then came my diagnosis. It happened in a stuffy, grey office with giant windows down one wall, which was entirely too small to fit my mother, the doctor, the social worker, and me in any sort of comfort. But outpatient facilities, for some reason, aren’t built for comfort. I sat on my aluminum chair, with my head down. The doctor listed off a number of supposed facts that would be ground into my identity and my personality over the next decade. He said it was genetic, that it was a lifelong illness, and that it would severely debilitate me for the rest of my life. I had no idea what was going on, but it took this man only a few hours of observation and five days worth of service notes to find a clinical (and billable) reason for my problems.
I could not begin to tell you if this man was right about all of that, but it certainly feels like he was wrong. Genetics aside, I’m currently failing to live up to his fortune. I successfully graduated university, established myself as a Peer Specialist, and then moved halfway around the world. I no longer experience the ups and downs of mania and depression, and I found out years ago that when I was, most of it was due to my own life habits. If I walked into a psychiatrist’s office for the first time today, I have no doubt that they could find something wrong with me. But it wouldn’t be Bipolar with depressive tendencies.
And that is precisely the annoying little detail that made Suzuki and his cow stick out to me. Who we are (and how we are) is very much influenced by what we believe we are. And certain labels, coming from certain places, bolstered by certain continued experiences, tend to mushroom in our consciousness as being more dominant than others.
For nearly a decade after my diagnosis, I WAS Bipolar. Almost every emotion, action, and thought was attributed to it. If not by me, then by my parents or providers. An argument with my mother was mania, sleeping in class was depression, and an accidental broken window (at the hands of an errant street hockey puck) was anger problems. Looking back, none of these had anything to do with Bipolar. The sleeping, in a twist of irony, was actually caused by my medication, which I took copious amounts of in the morning. This fact somehow went unnoticed by my providers, who gave me everything from lectures to light-boxes to “cope.” Even when my experiences weren’t attributed to mental illness, they had to go through an agonizing analysis just to be granted that privileged status.
Even the mental trick of saying, “I have Bipolar” instead of “I am Bipolar” didn’t help. Bipolar wasn’t a pet or a tumor, I couldn’t just point at it and distinguish it as different or separate from me. There was no “on/off” button I could press. It was mixed into my ocean of consciousness. Sometimes it was calm and sometimes it was stormy, but it was still, very plainly, me.
I want to be clear here that my experience as a client in the system was not inherently negative, and that I sorely needed professional support for a number of years. I won’t pretend that I could’ve magicked my teen self into any sort of healthy-minded individual all by myself. And other than a few bad eggs, I’ve been fortunate to have had trusting relationships with a number of providers. And the keys to my recovery (CBT, exposure, and mindfulness) were all introduced to me in a therapeutic setting. The main problem was that for any of them to work, and to make any sort of progress, I had to step out of the clinical world and into my own personal experience.
And it wasn’t even a provider that taught me that trick. It was actually my introduction to another master of Zen, the monk Thich Nhat Hanh, that opened my eyes to the world of just being human.
Like much of my recovery, this realization was an accident. I was in an outpatient class, in between semesters of my sophomore year of university, learning mindful meditation as a coping skill. After several sessions, and seeing my developing interest, the therapist mentioned the monk’s name and a few of his books as good resources for further practice. I bought Being Peace the next day. It wasn’t until I was a few chapters in that I discovered that the mental health field had usurped meditation (like so many other human experiences and habits) and worked it to its own devices.
My mind met this discovery with a mix of relief and confusion. If I had a clinical problem, why was something as ancient and simple as meditation helping me? And if normal positive human habits could be so profoundly useful, why the heck was the field marketing pills and “clinical” coping mechanisms to me instead? This frustration helped me jump ship from the medical mindset and hop into the world of humanity.
It took a conscious effort and a lot of reading to switch my brain into a human mindset. After devouring a handful of meditation books, I ventured into other nonfiction, from The Power of Habit to In Defense of Food. To steer away from identity for a moment, it was this latter book that helped me realize where clinical psychology had gone wrong.
But that is a tangent for another time. This story is about me, after all.
Being human, or trying to be, was one of the biggest keys to my recovery. It unlocked the path to self-acceptance and lessened the distance between me and “normal” society. It made every new problem that arose more approachable and less alien. My wellness tools shifted from medication, CBT, therapy, and exposure to meditation, exercise, healthy eating, challenging myself, and a better sleep schedule.
By the end of university, I had stopped going to therapy, reduced my medication and altered my perception of who I was. I was making progress. Ironically, it was becoming a Peer Specialist that delayed this progress, and kept me from fully recapturing my identity. It wasn’t the act of being a peer (something I feel proud and fortunate to say), but the daily experience of surrounding myself with the mental health world that nagged at me. I needed to separate myself from that world entirely to make that last step.
And so the reason for coming to Japan and discovering myself in Zen and cattle.
My parents thought it was a terrible idea. In fact, everyone was fairly surprised. It came out of left field for them. I had expressed my dissatisfaction with my life a number of times, but no one was expecting such a drastic decision. The question floating in the back of everybody’s minds was: Is this Greg? Or is this Bipolar?
I wondered it myself for a while. Even through the six-month application process, group interviews, and the bigger group trainings and introductions. Was this a mature, healthy decision brought about by self-reflection and personal growth, or just another instance of me running away and creating a bigger problem? I felt differently about it depending on the day. It plagued me all the way up to the day I left.
That changed about two months after landing in Kanazawa. It wasn’t so much of a change, actually, as a sudden realization that what I was doing felt extremely normal. It would have happened sooner, but adjusting to a new country is a bit taxing on the nerves. The thing that really did it was the amount of other foreigners in my city. Disregarding the total number of gaijin (the casual term for non-Japanese folk), there are nearly one hundred English speakers employed by my program in the Ishikawa prefecture alone. Not enough to make a dent in the local population, but enough to form a pleasant community.
There’s a word. Community. Everyone talks about the importance of having a community. I used to tell that to all the people I served. And I suppose I was in one, as a peer. But this one is different. My community of friends in Japan is the first one I’ve had since my hockey days that is built solely on positive mutual interests. And very importantly (for me at least), on independent choice.
There’s a strong connotation with ex-pats in Japan being anime-loving weirdos. In my experience, that is almost entirely untrue. And the ones I do know are some of the coolest weirdos around. Contrary to being misfits, they seem to be some of the most well-grounded, unique, and intriguing people I’ve ever met. Although, interestingly, a lot of them have felt like outcasts themselves at certain points in their lives.
And so for the first time since I was 14, I found myself in a community I really felt a part of. But it wasn’t just community that I needed, so much as one filled with the reasons above. I needed that background texture to support me as my new experiences slowly altered my identity. Because that is was experience does. And due to my new surroundings and new community, the words that filled my world were “adventure, experience, Japanese, teaching, culture shock, writer, bullet train, high school,” etc. Most notably, whenever the topic of stress came up (which was frequently), everyone considered it normal. After a few months of this, a lot of teaching, and even more cultural adjustments, I felt like a completely different person.
Over the past year, I’ve done things I thought I would only ever read about. I’ve climbed Mt. Fuji to see the sunrise. I’ve gotten lost in the woods in Kyoto and danced with deer in Nara. I drank sake with old men in Hiroshima, fed bunnies in Okunoshima, and meditated on top of a mountain in Miyajima. And along the way, I’ve come to understand the words in that Zen quote.
It’s nothing special, and it may not even be right. But it makes sense to me. Who I am is both what I do, and how I see myself when I do it. So I needed a more positive identity, better associations to go along with it, experiences that reflected the kind of person I wanted to be, and people surrounding me to implicitly validate all of the above. And for it all to work, I needed the whole package.
It was ten months ago that I read that passage. I later bought the book, which I confess I have yet to finish. While it is brimming with other similar life-changing quotes (usually with less bovine inspiration), it is not what you would call a page-turner. It is not a story for you to read, but a collection of ideas to apply to your own story.
And now, finally, I feel like I’m the author of mine.
thanks greg….what do you think caused your initial trouble at age 14…
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Greg,
“..It wasn’t until I was a few chapters in that I discovered that the mental health field had usurped meditation (like so many other human experiences and habits) and worked it to its own devices…”
….and turned it into “McMeditation”!
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Fascinating. Where I am, I think I am witnessing a recovery, and it’s because of exposure, community and sport. We’ve had the “the cause is organic , biochemical and medicatable” claptrap and we just laugh, taking bets on how long it will take the next psycho to mention the chemical imbalance.
It’s clearly not plain sailing and it’s precarious, often gloomy , hard graft. Asserting really firm independence seems to help, as does community. And people who believe .Gaining those morsels of self belief one by one, never going back. What’s starting to come out of the other end is impressive, awakened, loveable, comfortable and reborne.
The drugs were useless and disabling , the very last thing you need. The psychos studiously attack hope – you’re disordered, broken , imbalanced, and what I find repugnant, “there’s no point in trying to build confidence and self esteem because you will just feel like you’re failing”. They could not be more wrong.
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Very nice and honest self-reflection. Indeed, our reality is a mirror to our spirit, as that to validate and enjoy or from which to learn and grow. I wholeheartedly believe that.
“Being human, or trying to be, was one of the biggest keys to my recovery.”
Beautiful statement. Thing is, we ARE human–whether we like it or not. It’s when people don’t allow themselves to be human that they suffer. We have to be SUPERhuman, or something like that, to feel self-acceptance.
Being a “perfectionist” can be extremely harmful to our health. That is unrealistic and way too much pressure, sets us up for inevitable failure, each and every time. We are human beings, filled with all sorts of flaws, contradictions, and shadow. Part of life’s purpose is for us humans to grow as the result of our imperfections–to grow in our ability to love and accept ourselves, just as we are, from moment to moment, and to let nature take its course, rather than us trying to control nature. That is yet just another mass delusion, to believe that we can control nature.
We are also filled with light, somewhere in there. We can be it all, light and shadow. When we can accept that and allow ourselves to be all that, then we are free because we know how to be fully human, despite absolutely anything.
Thanks for the inspiration, Greg, and best wishes on your fascinating journey!
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I’m so glad you found what you needed and escaped the clutches of a toxic system that led you to doubt and pathologise everthing about yourself.
However, I find it worrying that so many in this movement seem to advocate another, if more benign, total system of thought as the answer to the distress that leads many people to psychiatry.
I threw myself into Zen for seven years. I saw it as the answer to my problems. It wasn’t, in many ways it exacerbated them.
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Just curious, out- how did Zen exacerbate your problems?
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I’d lost my self. It was a problem. The concept and practice of no-self was a kind of escapism in my particular circumstances. What I needed was to re-connect, to live from the inside out, to believe in my self.
Zen took me even further away from what I needed most. I became more dissociated and disconnected, more lost.
I suspect that practising Zen in Japan where it is more collective, centred within a community of relationships and traditions common to the culture, would be a very different experience. There has been criticism of the more atomised, “psychologised” western version of it – that it has been stripped of its context.
I’m not wanting to disrespect any person’s path. The reason I commented is that I’ve noticed a trend in my country of mindfulness/meditation being touted as the alternative to psychiatry, as the “solution”. For those who find their way out via this route, I’m happy, but I believe the benefits are overhyped, and that it is not for everyone. It is not a therapy, it is a faith (like psychiatry in that sense), and the benefits of discipline, stress reduction, community, belonging, and shedding a toxic identity and starting afresh can be found in a number of different paths.
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Thank you very much. That makes sense. I know next to nothing about Zen, or Buddhism in general, really. So thanks for sharing your experience. 🙂
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Look for “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism”, by Chogyam Trungpa, and I can strongly recommend anything by the Dalai Lama, as entry texts to non-Zen, Mahayana Buddhism. Also, “Going Home, Jesus and Buddha as Brothers”, by Thich Nhat Hanh, is an excellent little book that shows how much basic Buddhist and Christian beliefs have in common. To me, though, Zen is just a bunch of headgames!
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Out, you have touched on an important point: For some (often completely unsuspecting) people, meditation can lead to various levels of decompensation, which is a field of research currently attracting a lot of interest (Dr Willoughby Britton at Brown University has published in this area). And you also make an excellent point: No self is not for everyone, and it’s hard to control how far into that shift you go as a meditation practitioner (most people do not even realise that from an Eastern perspective, that is the entire point of the endeavour)…
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Perhaps the problem is looking for a total system of thought, rather than constructing our own over time and modifying it as seems best in light of new experiences?
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Thereabouts.
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That’s part of what I found was true for me.
I found Zen very rigid. I didn’t need another kind of guru to define me (or not-me in this particular case), but to be allowed to be myself and build trust in my self.
There was little community or personal connection between members, it seemed a very individualistic practise. I feel that the faith could very very different in other contexts.
But what I really needed was faith in myself, and through this, to be able to trust others, and to connect with them. Psychiatry had caused terrible harm to my ability to trust myself and to trust that others would accept me. It had piled trauma onto trauma and I couldn’t find a way out from under the harm that profound loss of faith in myself and that I could have a place with others as myself. For years I became a self-less, appeasing doormat. I became no-one. I took to Zen like a duck to water because it seemed natural to me. That very familiarity should have been a warning.
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Thanks Out,
Hearing this is useful for me as well and that there are other paths that work.
I support a lot of “the Buddhism” myself.
Thanks again.
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Certainly there are other paths that have worked in the past and that still work. To change metaphors a bit, the real experts often kick away the ladders when they have climbed high enough, and when they look around they recognize one another. This can even happen with the ladder called psychiatry, in spite of most of its practitioners doing all in their power to prevent it. A great pity, because so many people innocently expect them to be able to give useful advice on assimilation and recovery.
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Just goes to show that many, many peoples’ mental problems these days are mostly if not entirely situational and relatively mild and can be overcome by abandoning pathologisation and simply remembering that life is messy and chaotic and something to be lived, sometimes in pain, sometimes in joy, mostly in mediocrity.
Zealots on here will inevitably attempt to exploit narratives like these. They want stories like these to demonstrate that everyones’ problems are mild and situational and non-pathological.
As a non-zealot I wish to congratulate Mr Ronco for his abandonment of pathology. Particularly because it seems clear he was never an appropriate target for it. Some peoples’ bad luck turns out to be good luck, in time.
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Kudos to you, Greg, and thanks for sharing your recovery story. Absolutely, I agree the psychiatrists have anti-recovery goals. Their fraud based lies that their DSM disorders are “life long, incurable, genetic illnesses,” is proof.
“Who we are (and how we are) is very much influenced by what we believe we are. And certain labels, coming from certain places, bolstered by certain continued experiences, tend to mushroom in our consciousness as being more dominant than others.” I’m sorry this happened to you. In my opinion such mental abuse of youth is truly evil.
But I know that’s the goal of the anti-recovery minded American “mental health professionals,” and those others who benefit from their unjust, outside the law, defamation, torture, and murder of innocent Americans. I personally never really bought into my “bipolar” defaming “mental health professionals'” lies, because I was older than you, had no genetic history of such disorders, and was merely questioning an unusual spiritual experience, rather than trying to form my sense of self, thank God.
But I did in time learn about today’s mental health professionals’ primary function in our society, which is profiteering off of covering up rape of children. Since covering up the abuse of my child was why I was initially psychiatrically defamed, according to medical evidence, including the medical evidence of the abuse of my child, that was eventually handed over. And covering up child abuse is the number one function of today’s “mental health professionals,” according to their own medical literature. Which is sick.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/
Why?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1
“Even the mental trick of saying, ‘I have Bipolar’ instead of ‘I am Bipolar’ didn’t help. Bipolar wasn’t a pet or a tumor, I couldn’t just point at it and distinguish it as different or separate from me. There was no ‘on/off’ button I could press. It was mixed into my ocean of consciousness.” This kind of psychological/psychiatric brainwashing is disgusting and deplorable, my psychologist and psychiatrists brainwashed my husband in that manner, about me. And even I too, questioned this briefly, according to my journal entries. It took me a long while to walk away from the psychiatric defamation in my medical records, and especially within my insurance records.
And I was able to do it because I found the medical proof the antidepressants can create the “bipolar” symptoms, via Robert Whitaker’s research, and the DSM-TR-IV warning, that the common adverse effects of the antidepressants can result in “bipolar” misdiagnoses. It’s grotesque that over a million American children have been so misdiagnosed.
https://www.alternet.org/story/146659/are_prozac_and_other_psychiatric_drugs_causing_the_astonishing_rise_of_mental_illness_in_america
http://behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2009/09/06/bipolar-disorder-is-not-an-illness/
And it’s downright shameful the DSM5 now embraces this iatrogenic pathway to a “bipolar” misdiagnosis as acceptable. How lacking in ethics can the psychiatric industry get? I also found the medical proof the antipsychotics create psychosis, via anticholinergic toxidrome, a medically known form of poisoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome
I’m glad you were able “to step out of the clinical world and into [your] own personal experience,” and finally feel like you’re the author of your own story. On my second to last appointment with my psychiatrist, after I’d confronted him with the plethora of misinformation about me that he’d written into his medical records, he declared my entire life “a credible fictional story.”
The psychiatric assumption that they may dictate other people’s life stories is truly evil, not to mention highly delusions of grandeur filled. That’s when I needed to walk away. I’ll write my own story, too, thank you very much, highly delusional, staggeringly delusions of grandeur filled psychiatrists. And we may now congratulate them on the fact that their entire “bible,” and everything they believe in, has been declared scientifically “invalid.”
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
What did today’s psychiatric industry learn from the crimes of the Nazi and Bolshevik psychiatrists? The only thing they learned was to change the word “eugenics” to the word “genetics.” They’re every bit as evil, and they’re waging a new holocaust primarily against, “our society’s weakest members,” our children, and particularly our child abuse victims.
https://www.naturalnews.com/049860_psych_drugs_medical_holocaust_Big_Pharma.html
The psychiatric industry is deplorable. They are a pedophile empowerment industry. They are the enemy within, and their crimes against humanity and the decent people of America, is destroying America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kUpMecbv8g
https://www.jchristoff.com/government-and-elite-pedophile-activity-explained/
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SomeoneElse, the drugs and label Psych Services gave me caused me to become morally worse not better.
Despite the suffering withdrawal has caused (my iatrogenic sickness was already there; going off the numbing drugs just made it more noticeable) I get along better with everyone now. My conscience and empathy have reawakened.
Bet I’m not the only person made less moral by psychiatry! 🙁
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Ironically, it was becoming a Peer Specialist that delayed this progress, and kept me from fully recapturing my identity. It wasn’t the act of being a peer (something I feel proud and fortunate to say), but the daily experience of surrounding myself with the mental health world that nagged at me.
Cool article. The above observation is exceptionally astute. Though I’m sure some in the “peer” industry will have a cow when they read it. 🙂
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Not me. I think I get what he’s saying and I often feel the same about becoming a peer worker. I too think this to be a cool article. I admire and envy him moving to Japan, moving out of his comfort zone and yet discovering himself more fully.
So many peers state that they are “in recovery” rather than “recovered”. For me, “in recovery” means that you need a lot of external things to keep you on the path while “recovered” makes use of internal gifts, talents, and abilities so that you can put the “illness” behind you. “In recovery” seems like the “illness” is always hovering around in the background, just waiting to take advantage of you if you make a false step.
I hope that he writes more things here on MIA. It feels to me like we’re talking about the same old same old and just going around in circles but not accomplishing very much here. We don’t seem to attract too many new readers either.
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FWIW, on the title page of “Alcoholics Anonymous”, the quote is: “The story of how many thousands of men and women HAVE RECOVERED from alcoholism”. (Emphasis added.) The founders of A.A. spoke of becoming “recovered” from alcoholism, but staying in a “recovery process” for life. You can turn a cucumber into a pickle, but you can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber!
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It seems you had to confront a few things in your life you should have stuck to hockey!!
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Is this a Zen riddle?
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Thanks Greg; I am so appreciative of your essay, and am passing it on to my son.
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3rd Grade, Ms. Dilorati, Our Lady of Sorrows School, Wahiawa, Oahu for me, but when I realized I was Queer. Sister Tereasa was very hot with her blonde/golden curls. I loved her. Writer, teacher, artist (photo, paint) in Georgia. I had thought about teaching overseas, but remain in Title I Atlanta (Spe Edu, HQ, Consultative, General K-12). Keep writing. I’d love to see more of it.
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You are right, But not everyone can find themselves. One sage said that in life you should celebrate only 2 days, the first is the day you were born, and the 2nd is the day when you understood why.
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