I Didn’t Write My Story for People to Like Me

Further along I could see I was writing myself an understanding. My shadow life was beginning to appear. That started to lend to what I heard under my breath for years. "I feel like two different people."

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Now the story telling was for me. After sixty-five years of living as two different men, I needed to know how that was possible. It started to show. How a man who believed he was a good person could do the things I did without guilt, without shame, without remorse. Bigger than that, there were times I had no feelings at all.

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Writing my story opened a world I had been living all my life and didn't know it.

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Shortly after I finished writing my story, I could see something I had not anticipated. The same mechanism I was examining in myself — the compartmentalization, the survival patterns, the emotional vocabulary of only three words: happy, sad, and angry — exists in varying degrees in a great many people. People who have never committed a crime. People who are good people by every measure. People who have simply wondered at some point in their lives why they did something that didn't feel like them.

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I wrote my story for my understanding. But I believe it will serve yours.

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Benjamin F Sautter

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Photo credit: @thesmrevolution, @earthpulse111, @worldlife_ai