I must have begun composing this piece at least four times, including this one; I even considered emailing Ophelia directly, but ultimately decided instead to post pseudonymously…well, even more pseudonymously than normal. I hope Ophelia will forgive and approve the obviously-fake email address. For context, I’m a regular reader and semi-regular commenter, and I will be sharing some rather unpleasant personal details of my own life in this meditation, which I would rather not associate with my normal presence on this blog. Also, this will be a long one, so if long and personal and visceral aren’t your thing, feel free to skip.
I first came to know of Alana Feral through Tumblr, where he keeps (or at least kept) a personal blog filled with well-written accounts of his life and experiences as a trans woman, before and during transition. Many of these posts had to do with encouraging other trans women who begin transitioning as adults that they can still “pass” as women, given adequate hormones, exercises, and fashions. He often used himself as an example, and his “after” photos from this period are honestly beautiful, and not in a magazine-cover hyperfeminine way. He seemed authentic, and happy, as well as someone I wouldn’t think twice about calling a woman if I caught a glimpse of him in the street. I haven’t seen or thought about his blog in years, though, so I was quite surprised to see this story and these photos, here and elsewhere. And while I can understand the impulse of the commenters here and on Twitter to fixate on the superficial details of Alana’s biography as exposed in just a couple of sentences of a news article, I cannot help but draw upon my memories of his blog and what he told of himself to come to a richer impression and understanding of what may have compelled him to step into that ring.
It is with some measure of trepidation that I give the following context. Partly this trepidation is because of the social mores of Tumblr, which inculcate an asymmetric application of privacy; it is (or at least was) widely considered rude — if not literally violent — to comment upon someone else’s personal posts unless those comments were positive or affirming. Any other kind of reblog, even as jumping-off points to discuss topics more generally using someone else’s thoughts or recorded experiences as examples, is often taken as an invasion of privacy worthy of apology and social shunning. The fact that all of this information is publicly available and freely given is not really considered relevant to the social aspects of how this information is used, and the fact that I have not been an active Tumblr participant for years has not been enough to keep me from feeling the pressure of these social mores.
With that in mind, I wish to make it clear, for all the good that might do, that I have no bad intent toward Alana or any other trans person and bear them no ill will. I am simply compelled to muse on what I’ve read, and also what I’ve personally experienced, as it relates to the topic at hand. I should also state that I have not read every single thing Alana has ever written and I do not pretend that the context I hope to provide here is a perfectly exhaustive exposition of his writings. I rather hope to use Alana’s story, and my own, as a point of departure for further musings.
Three things stand out in my memory as especially noteworthy in Alana’s writings. The most strikingly relevant, in the context of his participation in this fight, is that his belief in “trans genocide” is entirely genuine. He has mentioned multiple times that he is resigned to an inevitable, violent death at the hands of a transphobic bigot. He has been preparing for that eventuality for years, if not for the entirety of his adult (and much of his adolescent) life. And, in his situation, with the scars of his upbringing, such an end — or the fear of such an end — is not an inconceivable fear to have developed, in the same way it is not inconceivable that a resident of a high-crime area will always harbour a fear of a home invasion even if they move to a safer neighbourhood or their neighbourhood organically becomes safer over the course of their lives. That is to say that the fear itself may be (or may have become) unreasonable, especially in the fullness of time, but the lessons learned in childhood are very hard to unlearn…in some cases, the task of unlearning is simply impossible.
The second thing from Alana’s insights into his own life is that, before he publicly transitioned, he had a strong sense of femininity (or, if you must, a female “gender identity”) from a very early age, which he attempted to suppress — more precisely, to eliminate — by becoming extremely outwardly masculine. As it happens, he and I were born not too far apart from one another, both in space and time, a coincidence which initially drew me to his blog and made me a sympathetic pair of eyes. In any case, I am intimately familiar with the hyper-masculine culture of southern Appalachia of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and the all-too-corporeal danger which a boy invited from his peers and elders by seeming too feminine (which is to say feminine in any respect). In that place, at that time, within that social stratum, a boy aspiring to be a girl — or, if you insist, a “real” girl unfortunately and incorrectly “assigned at birth” as a boy — was a universal object of ridicule and all too often the subject of depraved violence, often with the sanction and occasionally with the lusty participation of girls and women. As an aside, this was rarely the case the other way around; “tom boys” were an unremarkable fact and facet of life, especially when they were prepubescent. But that is a topic for further exploration another time.
In Alana’s case, the lessons he absorbed through osmosis and through violence convinced him that his internal sense of femininity was something deeply shameful and wrong, and he spent his youth and adolescence striving for the hypermasculine ideal, physically and socially. This urge to eliminate a significant aspect of himself guided many of his decisions, from growing a beard to developing an impressive physique to his choice to become a soldier, and an exceptional one at that. The desire to stamp out his femininity took him from the Great Smoky Mountains to the combat theatres of the Forever Wars, in which he played an active front-line role, with all that that implies. It was only once he came through that hell and rotated back into civilian life that he discovered it was possible to live more authentically, to live truthfully for himself instead of spending his preciously finite days in unending self-abnegation.
It is worth noting that these decisions led Alana into a vicious cycle, where the more he excelled at “being a man”, the more he found himself more deeply integrated into “manly” company and societies, the more he had to lose if he ever lost his internal struggle to deny that part of himself which his fellows might recognise as female. And, as he has demonstrated over and over, Alana is quite capable of achieving nearly anything he might wish to. For the record, it is a fantastic thing that he put his mind toward escaping the ever-tightening cycle of toxic masculinity which has ensnared far too many men of the Appalachians, and ruined far too many lives.
The above is mainly a summary of information Alana has freely shared, along with some context from my own experience of the culture in which Alana grew up. With the exception of my use of “he” rather than “she”, there is nothing even really controversial in what I’ve written, though I hope it is illuminating. What follows is…more speculative, and also more sensitive, and will certainly be in danger of misinterpretation or misrepresentation. It’s also quite unpleasant, so if you’ve made it this far and don’t wish to read further, you can bail out now with my blessing.
In any case, this is where Alana’s story falls into the background, where my own story comes more explicitly to the fore, and where the departure into speculation begins.
In particular distinctly recall Alana writing about being sexually abused as a young child by an older male relative, and his own musings about how the shame of this shaped and sharpened his revulsion at being perceived as a female, over and above the background radiation of toxic masculinity that he and so many other boys of our cohort were subject to.
Alana and I share more in common than the sex and region and decade inscribed upon on our birth certificates. In my case it was my father, who’d been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and so did not have very much to lose. As it happened he was an absent father as well, or rather I was an absent child, as my mother had shipped me off to her own mother in order to raise, but that is also a topic fit for a separate date of reflection.
The upshot is that many of my precious few memories of my father are of him sexually abusing me. I will spare the physical details of the events themselves, as well as the usual psychological exegesis of the guilt and shame which usually coincide with and spring forth from and outlast these crimes. But there is one aspect to my experience which I find relevant, or at least which pesters my awareness enough that I haven’t been able to resist re-re-rewriting this meditation enough to bring me to this specific aspect of the peculiar lessons my father’s actions brought me.
Though it was a violation, it was not violent. I suppose child molestation rarely is, which is why “grooming” is such a big aspect of it. I must have been groomed, though I do not recall the grooming, as such. I do know that my father impressed upon me the importance of secrecy in this one area of our interactions, a confidence I kept until shortly before his death, at which point the whole affair was treated as a dark family secret and only spoken of for a few days. Once my father was gone, it was never spoken of again. But, already, I digress.
All of that is to say that, aside from the aspect of secrecy and attendant shame that shall here go further unexamined, I was a precocious child who enjoyed the rare chances at my father’s attention, and I even enjoyed my father’s attentions in their own right. I starkly remember understanding that what we were doing was usually done by men and women, and I recall articulating this to him aloud, asserting with the confidence of a child that he should clearly wish I had been born a girl. I was not then certain precisely what distinguished boys from girls, but I was certain it would’ve been better if I were one. Incidentally, I do not recall my father’s precise response to these confident assertions, but it was not an overwhelmingly affirmative one; in other words, he did not insist that I was right, that I “should have” been born a girl.
Nevertheless, the thought was there, the spark of imagination. And if I had made a few different choices; perhaps if my father had impressed upon me the rightness of my own speculation, or come up with it himself; if I had reacted more actively to try and combat my shame and fixated upon that thought as its source; if I had had a few men in my inner circle who inspired me to try and stamp out everything which could have been mistaken for female…well, I can imagine a path for my adolescence and early adulthood which may well have resembled certain aspects of Alana’s.
I can imagine having a deep, persistent sense that I was “really” a girl inside despite all of my attempts to be as masculine as possible, and I can imagine having to suppress this sense in order to avoid it becoming generally known to the vicious and brutal hillbillies who formed the great swathe of my peers and extended family. And, lost in that swirling morass of toxic masculinity which held the temptation of camouflage, I can imagine coming to a critical point where I could choose between rejecting it entirely or taking my own life.
Again, I have no idea if Alana’s early experience of sexual abuse came with similar thoughts and ideas; I am speaking here purely of what I lived through, and some speculation about what I did not. And my path was most certainly quite distinct from Alana’s; indeed, there are far too many things we do not share in common for me to be at all confident in my speculations over what I might have done, or even what I might have felt, had my material circumstances nudged me into a different direction. But it is obvious to me that I could have slipped down the trans rabbit hole, but for a few uncontrollable circumstances.
From my own experience, then, I find it quite plausible and also simply evident that much of the foundations of trans activism lay in reactions to deep traumas; while not every trans person has suffered psychological or physical or sexual trauma (and, these days, hopefully quite a small minority), the mechanism is hardly unthinkable. Our minds, and our very senses of self, are plastic; no one is born Irish, or Chinese, or a metalworker, or an astronaut, or literary, or a fighter. We become these things, and more, sometimes because of our choices, and more often because of circumstances we could never have chosen.
I know all too well what it is like to feel alone, to carry the burdens of a cruel and pitiless life that one did nothing to deserve and yet which one must nevertheless endure. And I know the desperate desire to find someone, anyone, with whom one can share those burdens, or to simply exist in the hope of one day setting them down. Of finding some common thread that ties the whole damned thing together. I can well understand the desire to join a family of people with similar experiences and a similar outlook; I don’t need to imagine the temptation of having found an answer for why life has been so difficult, a ready-made source of all of one’s tribulations. I can envision a young person, abused and traumatised and left to their own devices, finding trans activism and feeling not only saved but vindicated by it. Finally having all the answers that religion and the family and community they were born into failed to give them, year after year, incident after incident, humiliation after humiliation.
I can imagine becoming so invested in one’s new community, in one’s new identity, in one’s personal history, that one could believe that anyone who did not agree with that community or acknowledge that identity or validate that history could be viewed as an enemy and a villain, intent on extirpating that community and eliminating that identity and erasing that history. And, from this, everything else that we have seen in trans activism can easily follow.
Of course, a trans activist might well say that my experience with my father proves the robustness of their case; that even with such an ample opportunity to develop a post-natal female gender identity through extreme circumstances, I failed to do so. That my own gender identity as a boy was strong enough that I maintained it through my abuse, and through the sneering and preening socialisation of manhood — which, while it was perhaps a bit more distant than for others, was by no means absent for me.
To this I say…perhaps. But I do not have this magical internal sense of gender that so many activists insist that everyone has; it is no more a part of my daily experience than the presence of God. Perhaps that is simply my “cis privilege”, and I really take no more note of it than a fish takes note of the water it lives in; perhaps, but I think not. In many ways being a man and falling short of manly ideals is impossible to ignore for any man, and there are quite a few manly ideals we are expected to uphold. Nevertheless, I seek always to act reasonably, whether or not it fulfills any of those ideals, and I spend very little time agonising over whether doing this or that thing makes me more or less of a man.
I think instead that I dodged a bullet. I spent a fair few years of my childhood angry at my father, and confused by the dissonance between how wider society expected me to react to my experiences and how I actually felt (which is another topic for another time). I have had quite a difficult life in many other respects, as well. I certainly don’t delude myself that I am somehow morally superior to anyone, not least other people who’ve suffered greatly and come to different conclusions about themselves, who’ve found some kind of community among outcasts, and now near-universal acclaim from all corners that matter while having plenty of enemies to battle against from other corners, draped in shadow and stained by the cruel scum of remembered traumas.
I eventually found it in me to forgive my father, to take what he taught me and make myself a better person (and, perhaps, a better man) for having had to learn it. There are yet more people I must learn to forgive, and a few others to whom I must one day make proper amends. Perhaps one day I will count myself among that number, on both counts.
So heroic! So proud!
Repulsive. :P
It takes a lot of determination to bring cage fighting into disrepute.
So, what is the peak age for women in MMA? Mid-20’s? And he’s now joining as a 38 year old rookie? Sounds like he’s trying to pick up younger women.
And slam them into the mat.
I must have begun composing this piece at least four times, including this one; I even considered emailing Ophelia directly, but ultimately decided instead to post pseudonymously…well, even more pseudonymously than normal. I hope Ophelia will forgive and approve the obviously-fake email address. For context, I’m a regular reader and semi-regular commenter, and I will be sharing some rather unpleasant personal details of my own life in this meditation, which I would rather not associate with my normal presence on this blog. Also, this will be a long one, so if long and personal and visceral aren’t your thing, feel free to skip.
I first came to know of Alana Feral through Tumblr, where he keeps (or at least kept) a personal blog filled with well-written accounts of his life and experiences as a trans woman, before and during transition. Many of these posts had to do with encouraging other trans women who begin transitioning as adults that they can still “pass” as women, given adequate hormones, exercises, and fashions. He often used himself as an example, and his “after” photos from this period are honestly beautiful, and not in a magazine-cover hyperfeminine way. He seemed authentic, and happy, as well as someone I wouldn’t think twice about calling a woman if I caught a glimpse of him in the street. I haven’t seen or thought about his blog in years, though, so I was quite surprised to see this story and these photos, here and elsewhere. And while I can understand the impulse of the commenters here and on Twitter to fixate on the superficial details of Alana’s biography as exposed in just a couple of sentences of a news article, I cannot help but draw upon my memories of his blog and what he told of himself to come to a richer impression and understanding of what may have compelled him to step into that ring.
It is with some measure of trepidation that I give the following context. Partly this trepidation is because of the social mores of Tumblr, which inculcate an asymmetric application of privacy; it is (or at least was) widely considered rude — if not literally violent — to comment upon someone else’s personal posts unless those comments were positive or affirming. Any other kind of reblog, even as jumping-off points to discuss topics more generally using someone else’s thoughts or recorded experiences as examples, is often taken as an invasion of privacy worthy of apology and social shunning. The fact that all of this information is publicly available and freely given is not really considered relevant to the social aspects of how this information is used, and the fact that I have not been an active Tumblr participant for years has not been enough to keep me from feeling the pressure of these social mores.
With that in mind, I wish to make it clear, for all the good that might do, that I have no bad intent toward Alana or any other trans person and bear them no ill will. I am simply compelled to muse on what I’ve read, and also what I’ve personally experienced, as it relates to the topic at hand. I should also state that I have not read every single thing Alana has ever written and I do not pretend that the context I hope to provide here is a perfectly exhaustive exposition of his writings. I rather hope to use Alana’s story, and my own, as a point of departure for further musings.
Three things stand out in my memory as especially noteworthy in Alana’s writings. The most strikingly relevant, in the context of his participation in this fight, is that his belief in “trans genocide” is entirely genuine. He has mentioned multiple times that he is resigned to an inevitable, violent death at the hands of a transphobic bigot. He has been preparing for that eventuality for years, if not for the entirety of his adult (and much of his adolescent) life. And, in his situation, with the scars of his upbringing, such an end — or the fear of such an end — is not an inconceivable fear to have developed, in the same way it is not inconceivable that a resident of a high-crime area will always harbour a fear of a home invasion even if they move to a safer neighbourhood or their neighbourhood organically becomes safer over the course of their lives. That is to say that the fear itself may be (or may have become) unreasonable, especially in the fullness of time, but the lessons learned in childhood are very hard to unlearn…in some cases, the task of unlearning is simply impossible.
The second thing from Alana’s insights into his own life is that, before he publicly transitioned, he had a strong sense of femininity (or, if you must, a female “gender identity”) from a very early age, which he attempted to suppress — more precisely, to eliminate — by becoming extremely outwardly masculine. As it happens, he and I were born not too far apart from one another, both in space and time, a coincidence which initially drew me to his blog and made me a sympathetic pair of eyes. In any case, I am intimately familiar with the hyper-masculine culture of southern Appalachia of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and the all-too-corporeal danger which a boy invited from his peers and elders by seeming too feminine (which is to say feminine in any respect). In that place, at that time, within that social stratum, a boy aspiring to be a girl — or, if you insist, a “real” girl unfortunately and incorrectly “assigned at birth” as a boy — was a universal object of ridicule and all too often the subject of depraved violence, often with the sanction and occasionally with the lusty participation of girls and women. As an aside, this was rarely the case the other way around; “tom boys” were an unremarkable fact and facet of life, especially when they were prepubescent. But that is a topic for further exploration another time.
In Alana’s case, the lessons he absorbed through osmosis and through violence convinced him that his internal sense of femininity was something deeply shameful and wrong, and he spent his youth and adolescence striving for the hypermasculine ideal, physically and socially. This urge to eliminate a significant aspect of himself guided many of his decisions, from growing a beard to developing an impressive physique to his choice to become a soldier, and an exceptional one at that. The desire to stamp out his femininity took him from the Great Smoky Mountains to the combat theatres of the Forever Wars, in which he played an active front-line role, with all that that implies. It was only once he came through that hell and rotated back into civilian life that he discovered it was possible to live more authentically, to live truthfully for himself instead of spending his preciously finite days in unending self-abnegation.
It is worth noting that these decisions led Alana into a vicious cycle, where the more he excelled at “being a man”, the more he found himself more deeply integrated into “manly” company and societies, the more he had to lose if he ever lost his internal struggle to deny that part of himself which his fellows might recognise as female. And, as he has demonstrated over and over, Alana is quite capable of achieving nearly anything he might wish to. For the record, it is a fantastic thing that he put his mind toward escaping the ever-tightening cycle of toxic masculinity which has ensnared far too many men of the Appalachians, and ruined far too many lives.
The above is mainly a summary of information Alana has freely shared, along with some context from my own experience of the culture in which Alana grew up. With the exception of my use of “he” rather than “she”, there is nothing even really controversial in what I’ve written, though I hope it is illuminating. What follows is…more speculative, and also more sensitive, and will certainly be in danger of misinterpretation or misrepresentation. It’s also quite unpleasant, so if you’ve made it this far and don’t wish to read further, you can bail out now with my blessing.
In any case, this is where Alana’s story falls into the background, where my own story comes more explicitly to the fore, and where the departure into speculation begins.
In particular distinctly recall Alana writing about being sexually abused as a young child by an older male relative, and his own musings about how the shame of this shaped and sharpened his revulsion at being perceived as a female, over and above the background radiation of toxic masculinity that he and so many other boys of our cohort were subject to.
Alana and I share more in common than the sex and region and decade inscribed upon on our birth certificates. In my case it was my father, who’d been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and so did not have very much to lose. As it happened he was an absent father as well, or rather I was an absent child, as my mother had shipped me off to her own mother in order to raise, but that is also a topic fit for a separate date of reflection.
The upshot is that many of my precious few memories of my father are of him sexually abusing me. I will spare the physical details of the events themselves, as well as the usual psychological exegesis of the guilt and shame which usually coincide with and spring forth from and outlast these crimes. But there is one aspect to my experience which I find relevant, or at least which pesters my awareness enough that I haven’t been able to resist re-re-rewriting this meditation enough to bring me to this specific aspect of the peculiar lessons my father’s actions brought me.
Though it was a violation, it was not violent. I suppose child molestation rarely is, which is why “grooming” is such a big aspect of it. I must have been groomed, though I do not recall the grooming, as such. I do know that my father impressed upon me the importance of secrecy in this one area of our interactions, a confidence I kept until shortly before his death, at which point the whole affair was treated as a dark family secret and only spoken of for a few days. Once my father was gone, it was never spoken of again. But, already, I digress.
All of that is to say that, aside from the aspect of secrecy and attendant shame that shall here go further unexamined, I was a precocious child who enjoyed the rare chances at my father’s attention, and I even enjoyed my father’s attentions in their own right. I starkly remember understanding that what we were doing was usually done by men and women, and I recall articulating this to him aloud, asserting with the confidence of a child that he should clearly wish I had been born a girl. I was not then certain precisely what distinguished boys from girls, but I was certain it would’ve been better if I were one. Incidentally, I do not recall my father’s precise response to these confident assertions, but it was not an overwhelmingly affirmative one; in other words, he did not insist that I was right, that I “should have” been born a girl.
Nevertheless, the thought was there, the spark of imagination. And if I had made a few different choices; perhaps if my father had impressed upon me the rightness of my own speculation, or come up with it himself; if I had reacted more actively to try and combat my shame and fixated upon that thought as its source; if I had had a few men in my inner circle who inspired me to try and stamp out everything which could have been mistaken for female…well, I can imagine a path for my adolescence and early adulthood which may well have resembled certain aspects of Alana’s.
I can imagine having a deep, persistent sense that I was “really” a girl inside despite all of my attempts to be as masculine as possible, and I can imagine having to suppress this sense in order to avoid it becoming generally known to the vicious and brutal hillbillies who formed the great swathe of my peers and extended family. And, lost in that swirling morass of toxic masculinity which held the temptation of camouflage, I can imagine coming to a critical point where I could choose between rejecting it entirely or taking my own life.
Again, I have no idea if Alana’s early experience of sexual abuse came with similar thoughts and ideas; I am speaking here purely of what I lived through, and some speculation about what I did not. And my path was most certainly quite distinct from Alana’s; indeed, there are far too many things we do not share in common for me to be at all confident in my speculations over what I might have done, or even what I might have felt, had my material circumstances nudged me into a different direction. But it is obvious to me that I could have slipped down the trans rabbit hole, but for a few uncontrollable circumstances.
From my own experience, then, I find it quite plausible and also simply evident that much of the foundations of trans activism lay in reactions to deep traumas; while not every trans person has suffered psychological or physical or sexual trauma (and, these days, hopefully quite a small minority), the mechanism is hardly unthinkable. Our minds, and our very senses of self, are plastic; no one is born Irish, or Chinese, or a metalworker, or an astronaut, or literary, or a fighter. We become these things, and more, sometimes because of our choices, and more often because of circumstances we could never have chosen.
I know all too well what it is like to feel alone, to carry the burdens of a cruel and pitiless life that one did nothing to deserve and yet which one must nevertheless endure. And I know the desperate desire to find someone, anyone, with whom one can share those burdens, or to simply exist in the hope of one day setting them down. Of finding some common thread that ties the whole damned thing together. I can well understand the desire to join a family of people with similar experiences and a similar outlook; I don’t need to imagine the temptation of having found an answer for why life has been so difficult, a ready-made source of all of one’s tribulations. I can envision a young person, abused and traumatised and left to their own devices, finding trans activism and feeling not only saved but vindicated by it. Finally having all the answers that religion and the family and community they were born into failed to give them, year after year, incident after incident, humiliation after humiliation.
I can imagine becoming so invested in one’s new community, in one’s new identity, in one’s personal history, that one could believe that anyone who did not agree with that community or acknowledge that identity or validate that history could be viewed as an enemy and a villain, intent on extirpating that community and eliminating that identity and erasing that history. And, from this, everything else that we have seen in trans activism can easily follow.
Of course, a trans activist might well say that my experience with my father proves the robustness of their case; that even with such an ample opportunity to develop a post-natal female gender identity through extreme circumstances, I failed to do so. That my own gender identity as a boy was strong enough that I maintained it through my abuse, and through the sneering and preening socialisation of manhood — which, while it was perhaps a bit more distant than for others, was by no means absent for me.
To this I say…perhaps. But I do not have this magical internal sense of gender that so many activists insist that everyone has; it is no more a part of my daily experience than the presence of God. Perhaps that is simply my “cis privilege”, and I really take no more note of it than a fish takes note of the water it lives in; perhaps, but I think not. In many ways being a man and falling short of manly ideals is impossible to ignore for any man, and there are quite a few manly ideals we are expected to uphold. Nevertheless, I seek always to act reasonably, whether or not it fulfills any of those ideals, and I spend very little time agonising over whether doing this or that thing makes me more or less of a man.
I think instead that I dodged a bullet. I spent a fair few years of my childhood angry at my father, and confused by the dissonance between how wider society expected me to react to my experiences and how I actually felt (which is another topic for another time). I have had quite a difficult life in many other respects, as well. I certainly don’t delude myself that I am somehow morally superior to anyone, not least other people who’ve suffered greatly and come to different conclusions about themselves, who’ve found some kind of community among outcasts, and now near-universal acclaim from all corners that matter while having plenty of enemies to battle against from other corners, draped in shadow and stained by the cruel scum of remembered traumas.
I eventually found it in me to forgive my father, to take what he taught me and make myself a better person (and, perhaps, a better man) for having had to learn it. There are yet more people I must learn to forgive, and a few others to whom I must one day make proper amends. Perhaps one day I will count myself among that number, on both counts.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you. I had things going on that day so didn’t have time to read it properly.