A little perspective please

I checked my mail today, and I found myself fascinated by a piece of paper. Name, date, social security number, address.....

Once I stood on the edge of insanity, realizing for the first time, what it meant to have men wish my death. I have drunk deeply from the cup of experience, and my eyes have been opened to the evil men are capable of. Am I now to be defined by such meaningless equations of raw data? Name, date, social security number, address. Is that who they want to think I am? Is this what I am to be judged by? My credit score? My driving record? Is this what people really believe is important? A little perspective please. It's sheer madness.

My vision of who I am as a person, has nothing to do with such nonsense. I am the girl who survived. Who still survives. Every day I survive my own fear. I survive the knowledge that people are capable of so many terrifying evils, and I do it every day. I have survived war, rape, assault, violence, insanity, despair, rage, guilt, shame, horror, and helplessness. I may not do it gracefully, but I have managed.

I accepted the inevitability of my own death, at times, I even welcomed it. I should waste time filling out three forms in triplicate, provide two forms of ID, and submit to a background check to open a bank account, when the GOVERNMENT provides my income every month? In order to fly home to visit my family, I would have to submit to invasive security measures, and pay out the nose for the privilege of that indignity. The world is mad. The government knows who I am, they have extensive information on my activities for the last decade of my life. First the army, and now the VA, but I can't be trusted on a commercial airline without a body scan? I had a security clearance for Christ's sakes. They know everything about my entire freaking life, including what all my neighbors thought of me when I was ten.

I don't understand people. A little perspective please.

I am 30 years old, and I have no debt. I have no car, and I don't make what would be considered a living wage. I also can't go to the grocery store by myself. I couldn't get on a bus to save my life. I write stories to amuse myself, and I pour my heart out on this blog every now and again. I can't look at my brother in his military uniform without having a panic attack. It is the mundane that terrifies me. If I walked down the street, how many people would I pass would be capable of the horrors I have seen men do? Would I pass the man who would shoot up a school full of children? Would I pass the man who stalks and rapes women, terrorizes them for his amusement? Would I pass the woman who would drown her four children to hurt a man who broke her heart? A serial killer? A man who is thinking of killing the people he works with because he can't stand the tedium of his own life? A soldier who is broken from the things he has seen and is one indignity away from mass murder? A person who hits their children? A car thief? But they want my name, date, social security number, and address to judge me worthy of doing business with?

What a world we have wrought for ourselves...
Please, a little perspective.