: : Plain Painter : :

A warm welcome

To My dearest November

All my life

I had been looking for something,

and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.

I accepted their answers too,

though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.

I was naïve.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I,

and only I, could answer.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with:

that I am nobody but myself.

~Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"