Thoughts on People, and Night Travels

I was musing today that there have been at least three people close to me in my life who could never sustain a relationship because they obviously had some serious problems with treating the human race decently, and especially women...they had criminal mindsets they could hide easily from others, or a huge, destructive secret they were hiding, or just were straightforward asses.  Yet each of these persons absolutely loves and advocates for the environment, though they treat human beings like disposable garbage.  I guess they stand for something in life, and we all share the planet, miscreants and decent people alike...but wow, talk about hypocrisy, and their presence is a disservice to all those who really care about both the human race and the environment they live in.  Sorry to be a crab about it, but I observe it and just shake my head...someone who dupes other people and preys on innocence, and yet goes on and on about how we are hurting Mother Nature.  It's enough to make one wish that Mother Nature would drop a branch on their head or something.

Anyways, tonight I went with my elder daughter and traveled through dark and scary Santa Cruz. looking for my younger daughter (these are not teens, by the way, but people approaching their thirties).  I suppose I should not have wasted a night looking for her, but I did.  As I said before, she has serious addiction problems and is in a terrible state right now.

I realize as I think and write that my time with m. has left me with many scars to my self-esteem and it will take time for me to recover from this (I really absorbed a lot of the awful things he said to me as if they were God's truth--he always said he was "helping" me when all he did was point out what an inferior human being he thought I was).  I have had to just keep trying to remember that I am a good, intelligent human being and that I am not the sum of what anyone told me I was.  I try not to have shame when I speak of a daughter whom I love with all my heart and who is out there somewhere tonight, God knows where, and who has embraced this lifestyle over and over since she was a teenager.  I fear for her, and I have to push away the shadow of what I was told about myself for so many years, that I was not a person worthy of the most basic assistance or respect from a person I loved.  I do not want these scars and have to look at them clearly in order to know what they are.