The truth is never simple. It has a few corners that can never be cleaned.

My mother was heroic for her courage, endurance and strength, but there was another side to her. She could be very cold and distant. She could wound with quick, harsh sarcasm, or an icy, uncrossable ocean of silence. She could be brutal and cruel, out of a fierce anger at the life she had come to, its complete lack of graces.

Growing up this way, at one turn her comfort and confidant, at another her profoundest disappointment, left me hopelessly, deeply scarred. I struggled all my life in my relationships with women and my ability to respond to intimacy. I wounded and used people, prone to irrational anger and abrupt changes of mood and tone. I too practiced an icy, cutting silence that built walls and distrust. I have been married four times, all colossal failures.

I carried around a baseline of anxiety that underscored and undercut every interaction with bosses, friends, supervisors and love interests. For a long time I covered it up with an impossibly wide, happy smile, determined to be the ray of sunshine no one could dislike. My insecurity, fear, temper and fundamental anger betrayed me again and again

It's taken a lot of self-examination to reach this point in my journey, where I could tell what I know of the story and look inward with frank honesty. I'm privileged to write every day. I want to tell stories, and not just a self-indulgent one of my own.