You also wrote: I think you and I both learned to deal with life through books - I would never have made it without them!

I agree. Funny, you mentioned Don Quijote once. I like him very much; though the difference between me and him seems to be that he became sick because of his chivalry books--they created an internal world that ended up interfering with his perception of the real one--while in my case they actually helped me open up and connect with the real world outside. In both cases books were fundamentally important, but their effect was different: Alonso Quijano, at the end of the story, wants his chivalry books burned and advises his niece never to read any such books; whereas I would do just the opposite. :-)

I hope this all makes some sense to you ;-)

You wrote: realizing that these questions are really non-questions can only take you so far down the path of healing when you have been taught that you do not deserve to exist. And also:

I hear in your words the voice of someone very intelligent who is nevertheless insecure about her own worth, the worth of her intelligence (since it could not keep damage away from her life), and her ultimate capacity to heal and find happiness. This sounds so familiar to me, since I often felt (who am I kidding? often feel) the same way. Maybe the best way to react to your comments here is to tell some of my own story.

In a discussion with AKA Smith once (about why some victims of abuse end up becoming themselves abusers) I mentioned my second (first American) girlfriend. I described how, after the first time we made love, she just started spontaneously telling little stories about her past ('you know, I just remembered the day my dog Spike came back home with a big butterfly!...', etc.; relaxing after sex made her want to reminisce). I mentioned how I just lay and listened to her, and how I understood that she was, well, undamaged. Her father was a great guy who always supported her; her mother a role model; her brother one of her best friends... Later that day, after I had left, I started thinking about her 'undamagedness' and how I admired her for that: her life had, in some senses, been so beautiful, in ways that she herself wasn't aware of. And it occurred to me that that could have marked the beginning of my own becoming an abuser: I would just have to stop admiring her for having had an undamaged life and start feeling angry at her for having been lucky, a luck she did not deserve ('why did she have an undamaged life while I didn't? Surely I am no worse or less deserving as a human being than she is? How dare she have had a good family experience when I was denied that?' etc.). Since in my adolescence I had harbored great anger and hatred at the world (MMM would have looked like Santa Claus in comparison :-), I knew I had this 'potential for hatred' in me too. Yet I didn't (and my thoughts that night may have had an effect on that, by making me become aware of the possibilities). I could have become like MMM and spin half-truths and overgeneralizations together with pseudo-literary quotations to attack whoever I happened to hate; but I didn't. I think that, that night, I avoided the temptations of the Dark Side.

But I didn't discuss with AKA Smith why I hadn't done that. Why didn't I go for the Dark Side? After reading you and pondering a bit, I'm now thinking it was because I realized that, despite the difference -- me-damaged, she-undamaged -- there was something common between me and her. Yes, in my damaged self, there was something undamaged that was just like her undamaged self. I didn't feel it as such a great injustice because I recognized myself in her, despite the outer layers of self-esteem problems, doubts, and pain. I was like her; I am like her. At some level I felt that; and so there was no need to hate.

Of course it is a catastrophe to go through life as someone to whom it was said that s/he doesn't deserve to exist. Of course this cripples us and takes away some of this energy that leads humans towards growth and creativity. I remembered Anonymous_Too made this point quite forcefully in another discussion, by noticing that damaged people tend to do less well in life than they would have done if they had not been damaged ('similarly skilled and talented undamaged people invariably do better', she wrote).

But it is my firm belief--which I will compare to yours that "anything is possible"--that there is a deep commonality, an undamaged area. Maybe you've read Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta? There's a moment when, in his cell, V gets a letter from another prisoner, a lesbian, in which she mentions these 'five centimeters inside of myself that they (the torturers) cannot touch, no matter how hard they try'. I think this is part of what I mean.

The damaged person will crawl under the table and cry and crumple into a fetal position, while the undamaged person will remain outside and face the world with serenity. There is a difference, there is a tragedy. But if the undamaged person crawls under the table to meet the damaged person, if s/he talks to him/her, takes his/her hand into his/hers... at some point the similarity will become visible, the pain and hurt will be seen as outer layers, and both people will realize that, if they shed these layers like used clothes, they can stand naked in their fundamental similarity.

There is a level--and a fundamental one--at which being damaged or undamaged is just like having dark or blue hair, green or hazel eyes, or any other superficial feature of our bodies.

This is, I suppose, a deep belief about human nature. Some psychologists and scientists will tell me that, one way or another, people are simply entities in reality. That we are like onions: layer upon layer of acquired behavior. If this is true, then of course someone can be fundamentally damaged, just like an onion can be rotten through all its layers to its very core.

I just think this is not so. It doesn't feel possible, in my own experience with introspection. I insist on thinking that the inner core is very different from the outer layers, and that being damaged, despite its seriousness, does belong in one of the outer layers. And that realization of this fact--deep understanding of this fact--is the path that leads to healing.