I don't remember if I remembered it while dreaming last night, or sitting this morning, but it was a childhood memory that makes a connection to both suicide and Zen later in life.

It's not that I had a miserable childhood. I don't perceive it has having been miserable. Whether my childhood meets with scorn or sympathy is probably relative. People in a worse position in life might show scorn, people in better positions might show sympathy. Or is it the other way around?

It's all perception, you see, because it involves my parents, but there's no way they could have predicted I'd end up the way I did. They provided just fine, they weren't grossly negligent. Not even negligent. Or maybe they were negligent and just lucky that nothing horrible happened to us. But they planted us in suburbia because it was safer, so maybe they balanced everything out in their heads. So no, they weren't even negligent.

But I remember in the perceived recurring worst moments of my childhood memories that probably weren't that bad, thinking to myself that none of it mattered, my self didn't matter (they'd be sorry when I wasn't around anymore), I can endure because my self is something I can separate from the misery. What was I?, like 8? And what was the misery?, like raking leaves? I have no concrete memory what I was so miserable about, and I of fair mind can safely say I'm not repressing anything major.

This personality creation might have been from even before 8. I think by 8 I was creating the misery on purpose, walking to school in the dead of winter without a jacket, just to see if I could endure it. No, not to see if I could endure it, I did it because I could endure it, I told myself.

Separate misery from self, and I can endure. That was the theory. And later it became, separate misery (self) from self, and there's Zen; and separate self from misery, and there's suicide. And in either case I can't endure, because that's built into whichever theory by then.