surprising reply from Dr Kaminski

 Saturday 8 August

This email today.  

Thank you very much, Bob, for your lovely letter. I am 72 and have struggled for years with my otherness, the tension between feeling like an outsider everywhere and being welcome as an insider, which became increasingly intolerable. I felt that to fit in socially, I had to be performative to seem predictable to others. (I call it pseudo-extrovert.) Eventually, I decided to stop performing and just be myself, to the best of my ability. The gain in inner balance, despite some loss of social standing, was enormous, so I never looked back.  

 

I have never changed my identity since the day I was born, and this is the same me walking into the future, whatever it may be. So for me, I am the center of gravity, not my life (which is happening to me with little control on my part). An otrovert, whether aware of that or not, does not have the tether to their contemporaries, which helps the communal people deny death until it is impossible. In my humble opinion, otroverts live with much better peace throughout the entire arc of life.   

As we otroverts get older, forced aloneness is actually a very familiar feeling.  Loneliness has never been painful to me.  And I come to this chapter of my life with the same solitude I experienced in my youth.

thanks you agaiin,

Yours, Dr. kaminski 

here is the letter I sent via email on May 18 

Hello Otherness Institute and Dr Kaminski 

How long I have waited for this marvelous book.  I read it, re-read it and

watched the comments available on Instagram and YouTube.  Also

took the test, twice. 

So powerful, clear, lucid and moving.  The book I have been looking for

since I was . . . 10 or 15 or 20 years old.  I am now 82.  

This explains what I have spent a lifetime realizing about myself and my

relationships with groups, hives, tribes, and teams.  Departments and

committees.  Gatherings of all sorts.  My own journey within.  

Thank you, beyond words, 

Robert Garlitz  

having his reply and remembering now my initial letter, I am moved once more; not "to tears" but to some feeling I am not able to name readily.  Note too how it follows one day after my annual checkup.  Not that they are connected and yet perhaps cosmically they are since I was going to tell Dr Fagan that he is the finest doctor I've ever met, but I did not do that.  In the evaluation e-message from MidState today I was able to say he was 10 out of 10.  Not the same, but ok.  

Read a few more pages of Anton Reiser.  A few pages a day will work well, alongside Stifter and Moresco.  Have to see if the novel blog discusses Stifter.  Would think so.  Nope, seems not.  

Another surprise for today:  "Mia Couto was born on 5 July 1955 in Beira, Mozambique, the country's third largest city, where he was also raised and schooled. He is the son of Portuguese emigrants who moved to the Portuguese colony in the 1950s. When he was 14 years old, some of his poetry was published in a local newspaper, Notícias da Beira. Three years later, in 1971, he moved to the capital Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) and began to study medicine at the University of Lourenço Marques. During this time, the anti-colonial guerrilla and political movement FRELIMO was struggling to overthrow the Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique.^{[citation needed]"}