So, not to be a downer, but I've got some trauma in my past. My dad wasn't a good guy, and did some pretty crappy things to me and my family. He was absentee for a lot of my early childhood. In later years, I found out he'd done some atrocious things to me and my family, including among other things, pretending to have leukemia when he never did, committing infidelity to my mother on an unprecedented scale, and financially compromising everyone in the family through lies and deceit, including me.
Cheery, huh?
All these awful things came to light for me at a cataclysmic time, and sort of destroyed the childhood I thought I had. One terrible net effect of this was that for a long time, I felt like I was sort of artificially new. Like, I had just had the shrink wrap off, or arrived here, as an adult, from a mystical land that wasn't real. It was a surreal feeling. I felt like I had no history I could reliably speak of.
I've come to realize that that's just not true anymore. Like, by a long shot. I was looking back through old photos in the giant digital graveyard that's my iPhoto library, and I have over a decade worth of history to comb through.
That's a picture of me driving my old convertible through downtown Silver Spring, about nine years ago. Missy took the picture, and it's been a favorite of hers (and mine) for a long time. We were out and about driving on a warm, sunny day. It's a great memory.
I don't have that car anymore. I don't have those sunglasses anymore. I haven't lived in Maryland for years. (I still do have the skull and crossbones bandana though.)
What I do have is history. Which just goes to show you, that while bad things do happen, they can't dictate to you the entirety of your being. Every day you get a little older, and each thing that's come before stays a part of you, but a progressively smaller one.