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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Bloom
Read between
November 30 - December 26, 2019
Sometimes I have doubts about my worth as a person, and wonder if I’m really accomplishing anything and am doing what God would want me to do. But if you express your pride in me, then I feel reassured that I am really important.… I need to be reassured and told this often, just as I need to see and feel tangible evidence of your love.…
That’s when Betty started complaining. She followed him into the bedroom, half-heartedly helping with the packing but mostly looking for some kind of comfort before he left.
Jackie used to divide her friends into two categories: “front-door” friends and “back-door” friends. Front-door friends were the ones who only came by when they had a reason; usually it was to talk about church business, or to ask Jackie to make a hospital visit, or something similar. Back-door friends were the ones who never knocked, who headed straight for the coffee pot, who felt free to smoke and talk “naughty,”
It was a nameless sort of depression, a sense that something was wrong, that perhaps she had chosen the wrong life.
She wanted to pull the covers over her head and go to sleep and be a thousand miles away. She simply sat there and continued to cry.
“Are the kids all right?” “They’re fine. They want you to know that we all love you.”
Conventional wisdom held that a majority-female jury is bad news for a female defendant, because women are, presumed to be harder on other women than men would be.
She was a person excessively concerned about what other people thought of her—a common trait in people suffering from dissociative reaction—so she tried to keep up a public front at all times. She wanted others to consider her warm and loving and concerned for animals and children, a person who didn’t have a violent or vindictive bone in her body. No one is that pure, so she had suppressed a great deal of anger over the years in order to satisfy her ideal self-image.
“John Steinbeck once wrote that there are those among us who live in rooms of experience you and I cannot enter.