What significant life changing expierences helped you become who you are today?

My mother passed away at age 12 causing me to grow up with goals and my future paved in stone so my brothers could live a happy healthy childhood with someone they knew very well and NOT in a foster home.

Hardest: Violently abused by my father from age 3-8 (he beat my mom too - divorce was a stigma in those days cos of the ‘obey’ thing); bullied at school from 12-16 for being too smart; Talking to people whose abuse-history was far worse than mine. Seeing my best friends buried after months of hospital visits during the AIDS peak of the 80’s; same with a number of relatives with cancers. Holding the hand of the cancer-ridden love of my life while his parents held the other hand as we watched the screens drop to flat-line after they turned off the life-support - it was like having part of my soul cut out.

Awakenings: falling ill on my first holiday abroad (Ibiza!); buying my first computer (a Commodore PET - 64k memory!); flying Concorde from JFK to LHR; riding the Orient Express from Venice to London; talking to the limbless polio kids in Mombasa and the locals there who thought Saddam was a hero; talking to street kids in Hong Kong and Bangkok; talking to gay guys in countries which denied their existence; visiting Kunta Kinte’s hut and a slave way station in The Gambia; visiting civil war sites in the US, Roman sites across Turkey, mosques/orthodox churches/cathedrals across Asia and Europe, Himeji castle and Shinto shrines + snow monkeys :) in Japan and stone circles in the Hebrides; my first opera visits in London, Vienna and Sydney. My first time on stage in the uni orchestra. My first time watching an autopsy. Having my appendix burst.

Talking to disadvantaged people is one thing, but it is seriously humbling when they choose to share stuff that you know they may never have shared before. 1) you realise just how huge the range of humanity and inhumanity actually is, and 2) when you then visit an ancient site or read history, those experiences give you a connectedness to the past and the present that makes you question every assumption you have ever made about life. If today’s people have these experiences when modern medicine, social support and technology is available, then how challenging must life have been in the past - and how many places on the planet have actually changed little (outside of the capital), even though a few nations have tech that would seem magic to those who have never heard of it.

Watching someone take a piece from a Roman mosaic floor to show the folks back home. In the floor, it’s a priceless heritage; at home, it’s a little piece of glass. It made me realise that some grown-ups aren’t!

The strangest thing? Being called to advise some Trappist nuns on wound healing in a nunnery. Someone rang a little bell as I was escorted thru the corridors, and nuns scuttled out of the way in the darkness ahead. I had no idea such places still existed, but of course men are usually forbidden. It was like time travel.

There’s a lot I can’t share here, and I’ve known a lot of painful times and difficult relationships as well as some very privileged moments. Would I go through it all again, including the sh*t stuff? Definitely. I would not be who I am today otherwise, and there are many words whose meanings and dimensions are very clear to me as a result. The biggest lesson was to be positive - don’t play ‘victim’ and avoid the ‘ain’t it awful’ game - there are always millions of people who are far worse off than we are, and human history is stacked with many more. Life is what we choose to make it, but it’s all too easy to give in to misery.

Seeing the Falklands war while in San Francisco was very different to seeing it back home, but it’s easy to assume everyone sees the same pictures. They don’t!

When i was 10 i was raising my 6 y. o. sister, 8 y.o. sister, and newborn baby brother. My mother was an abusive, bisexual, lazy druggie. In 2/3 through the school year i had missed 137 days of school. I had to learn to be a young adult way before my time to be. My room was filled with trash, and i was forced to sleep on the floor of my two sisters room in a filthy apartment. Then my mom got a boyfriend… he was… uummmm… FrIeNdLy. Then one day i was taking out trash when a police car rolled up. My mom was STONNED. She along with her boyfriend were taken into custody. I was put in a foster home with my sibilings. My sisters were given to their biological father, and my brother were adopted. That is where i stand today.