From Lynn: I wonder if the ache is not so much about achieving normal as it is about longing and stretching to be authentic

Lynn, that hits the nail right on the head for where I'm at these days. After a lifelong struggle to conform, mold and stretch myself into the "perfect fit", I now recognize that my authentic core self has been scrubbed raw by the grit of my own self-hatred, sacrificed to the whims of whoever's opinion I was believing at any given time, and obscured to the point that it is no longer recognizable - or easily retrievable - anymore.

A friend calls it the 12 o'clock dilemma, based on R.D. Laing's "The Divided Self" (which I haven't read.) He describes several stages of an (actual or hypothetical) process:

1. You start out just being yourself.

2. Somewhere along the line you decide that, whatever kind of payoff you're looking for, you'd get more of it if you were less like you and more some other way, more like someone else. So you start acting more like the person you've decided you should be. Laing illustrates this with a circle diagram; you started out at 12 o'clock but now you're pretending to be somewhere else on the circle, let's say at 6 o'clock.

3. There's nothing special to anchor you at 6 o'clock -- or anywhere else in particular -- so you keep adjusting your image until you get all the way around to 12 o'clock again, pretending to be yourself.

Laing points out that, close as that may be to just being yourself once again, they're actually a world (or 360 degrees) apart. The one is being; the other is pretending.

I know for certain I've been around the clock a few times! I don't know where I am at this point, only that it's somewhere full of "longing and stretching to be authentic". It's my hope that when I get there (and I'm making a conscious decision to enjoy the journey this time; you know, smell the roses - or fresh banana bread - along the way ), it will restore that long-lost sense of belonging. Maybe I need to belong to myself first before I can feel that sense of belonging anywhere else.