Our second prompt is to read the section in Chapter 1 on “self friendship” and journal it.
I cruised thru this chapter pretty fast because so much of it was about learning to like yourself and making time for yourself. That’s never been an issue for me. Guess you could say I have a very healthy self esteem!
As I thought about it, I realized there has never been a time that I wasn’t ‘friends with myself’.
As a child, even tho our homes were in nice neighborhoods…we lived around some strange neighbors. At one home, my friend’s mother would not let him leave the yard… period. Not to come into our yard to play (yard…not house), not to ride his bike, not to play in the field behind our houses. (We lived in a very small town with no real crime in the mid 60s – almost ‘Norman Rockwell’). Anyway, I would get tired of only playing in his yard and would head out into the fields and woods to play and explore. We moved from there when I was about nine into a nice neighborhood with worse neighbor kids. To our north was a family of nut cases (the kid my age ended up going to prison for grand theft auto where he was killed) and to our south, that kid ended up being an arsonist who went to prison also.
Needless to say… I played alone.
Now that I’m ‘all grown up’, I still find myself enjoying solitary pursuits. When I married Himself, he was a Special Forces soldier and was deployed a lot. When he retired… he went to work seasonally on a ship in the Bering Sea.
Good thing I learned to be my own friend!
