Writing about what you feel and think about everything in your life

You might pooh pooh this but it might be a matter of life or death for you and your family.

By writing down what you are feeling and thinking you start to come up with ideas about how to better survive your life and keep everyone else alive around you.

I started writing at age 8 when my 16 year old cousin in Seattle died in a car accident after first getting his license.

He somehow wound up inside a house with his friends in his car and had broken his neck. When he turned to ask everyone whether they were okay he died instantly because is neck was broken. "Are you guys all okay?" was the last thing he ever said to anyone.

However, this would have been 1956 and counseling wasn't normal for kids then. When bad things happened you were just supposed to deal with it whatever it was then.

In some ways as a boy I was supposed to emotionally be an adult after I was 4 years old. This is just how people were treated historically for thousands of years.

The other thing is that still around 1900 at least half of people's kids were dead by 21 years old. So, people tried to prepare themselves for their children dying still in the 1950s. Especially during and after 1945 when the war had killed millions of children people tried to protect themselves from Grief insanity caused by the death of Children by other members of the family and friends.

So, at age 8 I was not counseled about the death of my cousin other than being told the facts of how he died. That was all.

I was expected to deal with this all by myself. It made children very different than they are now because they were emotionally (especially boys) expected to be like adult soldiers in many ways by age 4 like I was.

Also, I was told by many people I would die as a soldier in a nuclear war by the time I was 18 to 20 years old after being drafted into the military. This wasn't a fun experience either. But, this was told to all boys from ages of 6 to 12 years old in the 1950s when I was growing up.

Luckily for us all this never happened. Even though the Viet Nam War killed 50,000 of my generation instead. More U.S. soldiers died there my exact age (born in 1948 than any other). People my age took this very personally too because the real reason for the war made no sense to anyone at all.