While dragging a sledful of hay over moist snowless ground to feed the goats just now, I was thinking about this:

I sometimes feel that my past, my experiences, have marred me, left me a virtual minefield, like a surgical mess that the doctors gave up on and walked away from without bothering to suture it closed again. Or, putting it less kindly, fucked up. I sometimes look back on the things I've done, been, lived through, seen, and my life seems a little surreal. I'm certain that there are people who disbelieve that I could possibly have gone thorugh all this in 30 years, and for a moment, I'm tempted to agree with them and try to decipher whether I could possibly have imagined some of it? But no. The hard evidence is there, on scraps of paper, faded photographs, newspaper clippings, and the like.

I look at all this and wonder why anyone would want me, and also if I'm any good for anything at this point. (I'm not depressed right now, either- just trying to be objective). Don't men (the decent, intelligent sort) want someone pristine and untouched, who's never known love before, who's never tasted much pain, who's never awakened on the side of a highway or under a bush in a public park, someone dewy eyed and moist like an unfurling flower bud? Don't they desire someone who's never been violated, someone mallleable without a crystal clear idea of exactly what they *don't* want, next time?

I feel like a tree that's been hacked down to the stump, grown back, been girdled, survived, had limbs broken off, been frosted, sunburned, whipped by the wind....and I'm trying to decide if this makes me a damned ugly piece of work, or a arboreal sculpture, like bonsai.

I can get over the fact that life hasn't been perfect, that there've been evil or malicious people and those with good intentions and disastrous results. After all, it isn't like I can change any of it, so I might as well come to terms with it. What I can't quite hack is that, because of it, someone will come along and think I'm not good enough, that the past might spoil the future.