You all may feel that this message is off-topic, but it brings home to me why all this really matters so much to us.

Shortly after sending my reply to Carmen I closed up shop and left for a concert on the lawn of the University’s performing arts center by a Celtic fiddle player named Natalie McMaster .. The concert was wonderful.

For reasons that I do not understand, writing what I did brought me in touch, evoked unspeakable feelings, brought to awareness levels of experience and feeling and levels of pain that have not come to awareness for ages. By the time I got to the Lied Center lawn the unspeakable feelings were overwhelming. I realized I was having trouble handling this and was getting close to the edge. I felt several times that I was headed over the edge. In the end, I stayed rooted. Now, I am connected to my ground again, but with the unspeakable still in my awareness.

I use the word madness, but words totally fail to come to terms with the levels of reality that have been evoked in me. I was a promising physics student, who had been struggling for years and years and years with unending depression, when I went over the edge into a nightmare world that destroyed the life I’d had. It was 15 years later that I was finally functioning well enough to return to it, and I never did. I am now in many ways in better shape than I was before I went mad. In the process, I have learned things and gained wisdom of infinite value, at enormous cost. My life was totally changed, and I will never know whether the changes were for the better or for the worse.

This is my story. Each of us has our own story. Our stories are different, but for each of us it is equally personal. The reason I write this is that it brings this home to me.

We are not in this as an “interest” group. We are not in this to acquire power and privilege for ourselves. We are not in this because of paternalistic concern about the situation of others. We are not in this because of abstract concerns about rights. For us this movement is about our very lives.

Dennis