Trexler 1
Karen Trexler
English 1A
Professor Brantley
October 10, 2016
The World Revolves Around Me, Or So I Thought!
“We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self–centeredness because it’s so socially
repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our
boards at birth” (2). All the trouble started when I seven years old and my mom left my dad. She
left us all behind, disappearing from our lives forever. I remember thinking at the time that I
must have done something wrong, that I wasn’t good enough, and that’s why she left. Dad
searched frantically for her for about a month and then gave up. Dad was in the Navy and would
be deployed soon. Not knowing what to do with five kids, he put four of us in foster homes and
let my oldest sister, who was 17 at the time, get married. One day we had a home and the next
we were living with strangers, my siblings and I. My 3 year old sister and I were in one foster
home and my two older brothers were in another and our family was broken. I got us kicked out
of the first foster home which reinforced the beliefs I had about myself. That’s when I knew I
wasn’t good enough. I was unlovable and there was something wrong with me. “Because a huge
percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and
deluded. I have learned the hard way” (2). This was the beginning of my turmoil that went on for
over half my life! As I look back at my life, I realize that what David Foster Wallace said
“everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute
center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence” (2) is absolutely
Trexler 2
true for me! Not once did I think about my siblings, mother or father, only in how the entire
situation affected yours truly.
“The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people,
given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing
meaning from experience” (2). I can relate! It’s funny how my siblings and I shared the same
traumatic experience, yet for my younger sister and one older brother, their lives turned out very
well and it appears not to have affected them much at all. Yet, that same traumatic experience for
my other older brother and I affected us deeply for numerous years and caused many problems in
our lives legally, financially, physically and emotionally.
Me, being the center of the universe, took everything personally! It was, in my mind, me
against the world! I had no trust in family or anyone else, started running away from home,
