HoS: Rob Henderson

I think the foster mom who was taking care of you, I say in air quotes because you can't see me right now as you listen, uh, was having you do these jobs. She didn't seem like a particularly nice woman. And you write about having this recollection as you walked around that, I'm all alone out here. I mean, I, I found that just almost hard to fathom. And that sense of being untethered from all things at age 7. That's just something I don't encounter that too much. I don't think I had an optimal upbringing, but it's, you know, I'm thankful to have never had that, to have been, to have been 7 years old and there's nobody in the world. I'm just going to say it bluntly. You had a cognizance that there was nobody in the world that really cared if you lived or died at 7 years old. You know, is that— that's not an exaggeration. Um, I mean, I don't even know where I want to go with that other than, are you haunted by that memory? Is that something that, because you've lived with it for so long, that you found your way out of it to a degree? Obviously it impacts you. Um, you know, do you feel like you fully left that place, um, through, you know, all the relationships you form subsequently, or is that sense of being untethered something that just connects you to, um, aspects of the world that many people like myself would rather just kind of suppress and pretend don't exist?

Um, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So even at that point, I, I remember— so in, in the book I described that the feeling was always kind of present, at least, you know, as early as I can remember, the feeling of being alone or isolated or sort of unnoticed. But then at 7, I don't know if it was just sort of brain development or just sort of consciousness coming more online or something, but I finally was able to sort of have that self-reflective, internally, the feeling was able to be articulated. And I realized like, "Oh, this is what it is."