March 2024: Janet Muirhead Hill

“to cause pain was a disease”

I didn’t know. I wish I had known. It would have made a difference in my decisions. I wish I had known that the compulsion to inflict pain is a disease. An overpowering disease that is passed from one generation to the next. The person who has this disease will hurt anyone he has contact with, if he can. But most of all he will hurt those closest to him. Those he loves the most. In doing so, he will push away the love he is convinced he does not deserve. He will inflict this pain with all the force of every pain seared into his brain that he suffered as a child. As those who would have cared, those who were responsible for protecting him, for loving him hurt him deeply, teaching him the best ways to cut others deeply, inflicting the most insidious, long-lasting wounds. And by hurting them, he hurts himself, and thinks he takes pleasure in it.

Hill writes from her rural Montana home which she shares with her husband, two cats, and two ponies. She writes for the joy of writing as she learns about life and herself through the characters in her novels and in the random poetry she occasionally pens. http://www.janetmuirheadhill.com