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Brian Sankarsingh's avatar

I was laughing all the way through this post. That mirror that you held up in this article was so clean I could see myself clearly in it. It left me to wonder if I stumbled onto beginning to understand this as a teenager by sheer happy mistake. Let me explain. I had a group of "nerdy" friends who consumed sci-fi like it was ice cream on a hot summer's day. We used to get together to talk into the wee hours of the morning about Tolkien, Asimov and Herbert. In Frank Herbert's Dune the progeny of the Atreides family have the ability to take a drug and access all the memories of all their ancestors. Frank portrays this as the actual ancestors in the persons' head vying to be heard or focused on. He suggests that to prevent oneself from going insane one needed to focus on the voice on one ancestor and use that as a single medium to deal with all the others. As a teenager, it made sense to me. I had all these parts of my personality vying for ascendancy and I had no idea "what I wanted to really be." Of course I did not have the insight back then to properly understand what that meant - but fortunately that would come later.

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