Gnothi seauton

It's a sad and awesome fact that so much of who we are, so many of the decisions we make, so many of the fuck-ups we perpetrate are so causally tied to the problems and events of our childhoods. Not to say that we aren't responsible for our mistakes nonetheless--we might even be more responsible for not having figured this out about ourselves and dealt with it; but how often delving into our motivations, do we realize that the antecedents for the decisions we make, both good and bad, are somewhere back in our early years? How often, in hurting another person, do we find out that the person we would really like to hurt is a parent who left or some other figure from the faraway past? And how much worse is it that we do cause pain to those who deserve it so little.
Wordsworth was right. The child is the father of the man; and, too often, the man is but a child.