I am writing my autobiography. I actually started it years ago but abandoned it. Today, I found this file again and decided to work on it this year. Here is the preface.

Preface
I do not think of my life as interesting. Interesting is something that piques your attention, like a good story that you listen to sitting with your chin in your upturned palms waiting to hear what happens next, or the conclusion. The story of my life is not like that. There are far too many places in the telling of my tale that are painful, sometimes terrifyingly so. Even the comic is sometimes tragic. People instinctively shrink from pain including the pain of others. Is that possibly why we avert our gaze from the homeless and the disfigured?
Despite what has happened, I live because I cling almost desperately to the beauty that speckles my life, like the stars that litter the night sky. Most people live in the light of day marked by the shadows of misfortune. I live in the dark. I know only occasional days filled with sunlight and brilliant colors. These bright days become the stars that glitter within my night sky.
I am always afraid. The dichotomy of this is that I no longer fear anything. Fear has become so much a part of my every day existence that I regard as a nagging pain, one that no amount of medication will eliminate. It is physiological. I feel the tension in my muscles and the tightness in the pit of my stomach as if I had just heard an unexpected noise, alone, in the middle of the night. I know nothing is really wrong. It is my body chemistry playing tricks on my mind. It is no wonder that so many people with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder think that they are going crazy! Somehow, I ignore the sensation of fear during the day, but when I sleep and I have no conscious control over where my dreams wander, I have nightmares. Terrible nightmares. Not even Steven King can write the stuff of which my dreams are made. It is my dreams that I cannot escape, so sleep does not come easily to me. All right, I am afraid to go to sleep, so I do fear something. I also fear death. That is new to me. I can think of nothing else to fear.
My story is of how a little girl grew to be the woman I am today. In some small way I am extraordinary, but not interesting.
Many will find this difficult to read. It will never be anyone’s favorite or a classic. It was never meant to be. It is my autobiography, my story, nothing more and nothing less. It is fictionalized only to fill in memory blanks or to protect the identity of others. The transitions are contrived to help the story read more easily. That is the advantage of pen and paper. In real life, sometimes there are no transitions, no time to adjust to or accept events. In real life, sometimes events collide together, like the destruction of the World Trade Center. One moment one is walking across the room to refill a cup of coffee, and the next, a plane implodes into the towers. Again, I will contradict myself: it is a fictionalized account based upon actual facts. Thanks to television, everyone understands this wording. Any resemblance to real, live characters will often be deliberate. In fact, I will use the real names of protagonists and others whenever possible, especially when the events I describe are documented by public record.
I apologize to those whom I will undoubtedly hurt, especially my family. My sisters will be hurt because I dare breach the past, and because their behavior was often abominable towards me. I do not blame them now. We were all products of the same family and the same environment. We were young, immature, and did not have the skills to navigate all of life’s detours, but most importantly, they too were victims. I apologize to my surviving son, who gratefully, does not share my surname. I hope that this will give him some distance from this account and me. I cannot, however, protect him completely from the embarrassment of knowing that his mother was once a sexual and sensual being. One of the oddities of men is that they view their mothers as asexual creatures. I often joke that only a group of men could get together and rule that the mother of Christ was a Virgin forever. My advice to my son: do not read this book! Ignorance in this instance can be a blessing.
I thank my grandparents, Elizabeth and Otto Schneider, for providing me a glimpse of what it meant to be respected. Outwardly, they were true pillars of social decorum. If only I had not been so very young and could have understood more! I thank the Sisters of the Good Shepherd for instilling in me a sense of decency and morality that guided me throughout my life. I can never claim that my numerous transgressions were out of ignorance. I thank the staff of the Tampa Vet Center. They opened my eyes to those reflections that I feared the most and helped me to understand the substance of my past in the present tense.
I borrowed my title from the scriptural verse cited at the start. While the apostle, Paul, referred to what we will understand after death, for me his words have another meaning. As we age, we mature emotionally, and with this increased understanding, our past becomes clearer. We call this hindsight. I prefer to think of it as the murk of youthful misunderstanding clearing with age.
Too many of our immature perceptions become the myths that we structure our lives around. I have worked very hard to debunk my personal myths. While shadowy fragments of those personal myths still cloud my perceptions, I choose to come face to face with all of my past and not just the moments of which I am proud. This will be harder to write than it will be to read. Honesty can be painful. Fortunately, honesty is liberating too.