Given where I am now headed with RJsCorner, I think it’s necessary to try to gather all the myriad of struggles I have had in my life into one post. I will clue you in on “why” at the end of this “one post”.

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From the age of nine, and even a little before that, I have spent my life struggling with one thing after another. In some ways I had no childhood. I was cooking most of the meals for my dad and my self-absorbed little brother before I was ten. My father was a person who just failed to see his worth, and my little brother, even at the age of six was self-absorbed with himself. He became the center of attention after being hit by a car at the age of four and he has seemed to never have left that state until recently.

I never learned many things that “normal” kids learned. I never had a father to look up to in that regard. My mother abandoned the family when I was nine but she too was “self-absorbed”. Everything HAD to be about her. She just didn’t want to be the wife of a milk man so she took off for greener pastures.

With this environment I never learned what it was like to have “family”. I never learned what love was supposed to be like. I never learned most of the things that other kids learned in their childhood.

I knew from an early age that I was different from those around me. I just didn’t know to what extent. Throughout most of my existence my social skills were practically non-existent. The only exposure I had to females was simply not conducive to making lasting friends. That would continue throughout my mid-life. I had few female relationships and the ones I did have never lasted beyond the third date. In December of 1985 at the age of 39 I decided that I would never marry. Then someone asked me out on a date. We were married four months later. I never understood how this happened so fast. It just seemed a dream world to me as it was happening.

Just because I was married didn’t mean that I suddenly understood the opposite sex. A small degree of that understanding would come gradually over the next 35 years, and even then I don’t think I ever came to know what marriage was supposed to be about. We were opposites in almost every way. I was a person who questioned every and she was a person who never seemed to question anything. I was a person who loved to travel; she loved the same daily routine for almost every day between our marriage and her death.

I became profoundly deaf at the age of 42, which is now almost forty years ago. During this time in my life I struggled daily to even become partially attuned to what is going on around me. That has been slightly ameliorated for the last four years thanks to speech-to-text apps in my cell phone. At least I can now “hear” what is going on around me, but it is still for the most part, confusing.

After my wife died, I stayed at the same retirement community where she spent her hospice days. I have been here for five years now and throughout that time I have struggled with dealing with the “social life” and most everything else that goes with RetCom living..

My life has been one continuous struggle after another.

I will admit that sometimes I am consumed with self-pity. But, then I soon realize that many other people struggle far worse than me.

All of the above means that I have lived my entire life on the margins. Finally, getting to the end of this post, the above stories give you an idea of why I continue to live life on the margins in my RetCom. Fortunately, my 5 year RetCom time has also sometimes been fulfilling beyond my imagination.

Going forward, each Friday’s post here at RJsCorner will be the start of telling a story about my “RetCom Life On the Margins“and how it has changed my life.