rivka

I just want to mention that your "person the story isn't about" line really helped clarify something for me. I was just reading an article about Native American children being sent to boarding schools where they were stripped of their identities and treated in ways that can only be described as child abuse. Some weird hindbrain reaction was going on, trying to deny that it could have been as bad as the article described, like *I* had a personal investment in denying it. Because, of course, it was white people who did the abusing, which . . . did *not* make it about me. And once I was able to recognize that reaction and get rid of what amounted to panic, I could "listen" to the experience and (I hope) learn something from it.