From fiction

"... Of course neither of them had known what to do with anything resembling the rage, discomfort, fear, vulnerability, and sadness that lurked around the fringes of those emotional highs, because each was the tip of an iceberg of feelings amassed and frozen in early youth, legitimately felt toward parents too busy and narcissistic to care how their actions effected their young children. They had both grown up in situations like this, repeatedly battered against the wall of unwillingness of any parent to compromise their agendas for the sake of the life they had brought into this world.

He wondered why this was coming up now. Why the loneliness and near-desperation followed so closely on the tail of holding a magnificent sense of empowerment as he walked down to the canal, a feeling that the being he had always hidden trapped inside himself was finally ripping out through the surface of the small persona he had constructed to navigate the hostile and uncaring world of his home. He understood instantly the mythology of superheros busting out of their mild-mannered lives to encounter and claim their true calling. He felt his spirit grow into an incredible hulk as he walked downhill and through downtown and realized that the superhuman feats that had eluded him until now - getting responsible about a job, attending to a relationship with care and presence, keeping each in their place - were going to be possible for him now. He reflected momentarily as he stared into the darts of light reflecting off the water how tragic it was that his mother's abuse had so handicapped him that the stuff of normal life felt to him like the stuff of myths and movies.

He trembled slightly, felt cold in the light of the sun. Because he saw that, although establishing himself in a job would be an astounding feat, what came next, a real relationship, would be simultaneously the door into an unknown and terrifying path forward, and a narrow ledge along the plunge back into insanity, addiction, and feelings too awful to bear - the remnants of neglect and sensual torture by his mother - the relationship that had dominated him, the only relationship that he had been offered, the relationship he lived over and over again, and had never yet been able to escape."