Introduction

Who Am I?

Who am I? For most of my life, that question never really haunted me.  Sure, I thought about it from time to time, but I didn’t make it my life’s passion to find an answer.  That is, until now. 

 My upbringing may have had something to do with me suppressing the question of who I am.  It’s amazing what happens to a young person’s natural curiosity after years of repression by nuns, priests and parents, threatening eternal damnation for even thinking there may be other answers to the mysteries of life. The Catholic Church buries that curiosity by covering it over with so many rules and doctrines that most people never can dig themselves out.

The story of my Catholic upbringing will have to wait for another time however.  It would take a separate book – and possibly years of therapy – to open that issue.  I will touch on parts of it though, as I relay the story I am about to tell.  Suffice it to say, now I am glad I experienced it, but at the time I was living it, I felt that going to hell and going to a Catholic grade school were a parallel experience.
The beginning of this story is a bit elusive because the more I learn, the more I realize this story has no real beginning, and the ending, is anyone’s guess as well.  Therefore, I suppose the best starting place is when I became aware of certain events in my life, events that were becoming just a little too coincidental for even me and my Catholic background to blindly accept.