I’m insecure. Often frantically. I seek love I’m sure I’ll never find. I crave kind words and distrust them. I hanker to invade brains I cherish to discover what they really think.

It has always been so. I attribute this to my parents, who never showed love. Oh, for a hint of praise from my dad! Jane wants me to shush about my dad – and she’s right – yet how can I, when his insatiable discontent has been my motive force? His contumely used to gall but now I’m glad of it. Unable to please him I had to try harder. I’m trying now, though he’s six decades dead. This is a condition, not a complaint. Sure, it stung, but it made me who I am. Change one part, change all, and then who would I be?

I mention this to you for three reasons. First, confiding is a mode of entreaty: the more we give of ourselves, the more we hope for in return. Call this spiritual economics. Second, I’m convinced I’m not unusual: what’s happened to me may well have happened to you, and injury is assuaged by company. Third, to prove I can. I write, in part, to poke a flashlight under the bed, to reveal my monsters as threadbare toys.

(I might add a fourth: unflinching candor is a sort of swagger. Maybe my intrepidity will impress you. No motive, alas, is pure.)

My insecurity made me a performer. This is the germ, I suspect, of the creative urge. We yearn to ingratiate with what we make. This is the throbbing heart of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, for example: love me and I’ll immortalize you in my rhymes (which he did). Urgency to express made me a student of existence. I explored being so I could describe it better.

Viewed from afar, such insecurity is hilarious. I suffer insecurity attacks as epileptics their seizures. When I lament my lovelessness to Jane, she smiles, “Poor baby.” Self-ridicule doesn’t rid me of my apprehension. Only time can do that.

You might think, after seventy-three years I’d outgrow this absurdity. But do I want to? Granted, it hurts, but it keeps me busy – searching for that word that will silence doubt. It dangles like the carrot before the donkey – or Tantalus’ ripe plum just there on the tree. I can almost taste it. Better luck next time!

Most of my life I envied the secure. I observed their self-satisfaction with astonishment. How could that person be so smug! Complacency, though, begets complacency. It may improve your sleep, but not your result.

Henry, my canine companion, views my consternation curiously. What kind of dummy, he wonders, wishes to be other than they are! If we leave Henry a while he misses us but seems never to question our allegiance. How joyously he greets our return, not a quiver of reproach! (“In times of joy, all of us wish he possessed a tail we could wag,” said Auden.) He is who he is – Henry! How could he be insecure!

I take notes. But such unconstrained exuberance is not for me. If I don’t know where Jane is I feel forsaken in no time flat. “Oh,” she says, “my phone was turned off.” I hide my horror behind a strained smile.

Insecurity is my curse – and blessing: my disconsolacy – and consolation. The story goes, the poet Rilke, quitting his therapy sessions with Dr. Freud, explained: “Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.”

It is turning four a.m. Were I easy with myself, would I be awake scribbling at this chilly hour?