A conversation with myself

Looking down the years, along the thread my heart has measured, beat by beat, this question has come up occasionally: How did I arrive here, more or less functional, when my two siblings seem to have faltered and stopped somewhere behind me, developmentally?

I'll digress a bit to unpack a couple of assumptions. First, they are two different people. John I love and respect deeply and however he has grown, he has grown up. Matthew, with whom I eventually cut off contact for many good reasons, is a story for another day, however. This question is not about them so much as it is a rumination on our shared difficult circumstances, and on the tenacity it took to make something from them.

Once, I asked out loud, in a room I had entered to be witnessed, and healed. The answer came: "Because you are incredibly strong."

I took that in, and have since had conversations with myself about where that strength came from. I now think, sparked by the line from Carlos Santana's song, that it came from me, as the Angel with her hand on my head. I think she is in fact the ageless part of me, taking shape in conversations between my selves, past, present, and future.