# Trauma

          👽   Some with eerily life-changing effects...
 
By now the ball of yellow light was closer, brighter, becoming huge, beginning to envelop and swallow up my feet. As it crept ever so slowly up around my body I found I was unable to move. It reached my chest and I was unable to breathe. Just before the light swallowed my head, I attained logical consciousness of the consequences of not breathing. But I was totally unable to move any part of my body. In parallel with the classic inventory of my life flashing before me, I frantically (if one can be frantic and paralyzed simultaneously) explored for some bit of my existence I could still control.
 
(Actually, I have no idea when this happened... Probably after 1953... )

          🧬   This site tries to tie together things many people share but have no words for...
 
Just before fourth grade I was no longer able to avoid the eye doctor. He was a true believer in the “Plus Lens Theory”, a type of “conversion therapy” which imagined you could train away myopia by forcing kids to wear bifocal glasses for every waking moment.

          🌦   So far we're just setting the stage; later there will be theories...
 
But that was also the summer of Sputnik, and my first shortwave radio kit. Hints there was an interesting world somewhere beyond my limited horizons. (Shortwave then was a bit like the internet is now - your choice of news, education, propaganda, and music from all over the world!)

          ♻   And here is the tortured birth process of the theories...
 
Without words to recall and research my inner memories of childhood, they faded to insignificance behind the onslaught of fascinating technology I discovered during my teen years. Soon after I entered the engineering curriculum at the University, I was reading Ayn Rand's Objectivism and looking to the conscious mind for answers to all of life's questions. And then the 'Death of God' made the cover of Time magazine...