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Bag-lady fears

To me it was always about my bag lady fears. It's a fear that men don't have, by the way. It comes from distant parenting or childhood abandonment. I had that. It's what happens if you don’t have a nurturing environment as a child, and you think this could happen, that you're going to end up on the street. (“The Bag Lady Papers”: How to lose money and alienate people,” Alexandra Penny in discussion with Thomas Rogers, Salon, 10 Feb. 2010)

Re: “It's what happens if you don’t have a nurturing environment as a child, and you think this could happen, that you're going to end up on the street.”

She's offering us a ton here. She's says guys don't know this fear, but it certainly is something I'm familiar with. I doubt, though, that it's just the distance that does it. The connection between finding yourself alone, on your own, and very vulnerable to absolute dissolution, requires something more than just having well known indifference and huge-gapped distance. More likely, it is that as a teen on -- that is, when you've moved beyond the stage of childhood, where you are naturally drawn to your parents and the familial surround, to wanting to explore a world all your own -- your poorly nurtured parents reject you for the sin of moving beyond them (the same fate they suffered from their own parents, when they stopped be so interested in feeding their parents' own attendance needs). (So it's not the distance, but rather the DISTANCING -- the INTENTIONAL abandonment.) So even if you understand all your gains as well-earned, as the product of hard-work -- that is, even while you try and tame down your joys by associating them with long-suffering -- you always feel that at some point being eaten away on the streets, will be in it, for you.

A big bag of warmth and love for you, Bag Lady. I'm sorry the therapy didn't quite do it for you. That must have been very discouraging.

Link: “The Bag Lady Papers”: How to lose money and alienate people (Salon)

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