The drama is this
“The drama is this. We came as infants “trailing clouds of glory,”
arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe, bringing with us
appetites well preserved from our mammal inheritance, spontaneities
wonderfully preserved from our 150,000 years of tree life, angers well
preserved from our 5,000 years of tribal life—in short, with our
360-degree radiance—and we offered this gift to our parents. They didn’t
want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy. That’s the first act of
the drama. It doesn’t mean our parents were wicked; they needed us for
something. My mother, as a second generation immigrant, needed my
brother and me to help the family look more classy. We do the same thing
to our children; it’s a part of life on this planet. Our parents
rejected who we were before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection
is probably stored in some pre-verbal place.”
―
Robert Bly,
A Little Book on the Human Shadow
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