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The little boy in me fears punishment, so I have been very good.

Like an obedient robot — one who tightly follows an outwardly imposed order but who has no will of his own — I have followed a rigid path which I saw as good. I have followed my programming, even after my programmer was dead. And I still fear the dark desires of my heart which might lead to corruption or sin.

I was expected to be perfect. I believed I should be — and could be — perfect. I felt shame when I deviated from my script in any way. I felt happy only when I could point to my apparent perfection and say, “Please tell me what a good boy I am!”

I thought everyone who was decent was doing the same thing. Those who weren’t following the same perfect path — or desperately trying to — were bad people. I associated everything good as being of the mind and spirit. The physical desires of the body were bad. Those were the things that took people into sin. My childhood programming and my religious teaching agreed.

The flesh was evil. I had to resist it.

The inner conflict of my life has been between the “good” part of me striving to be without fault and the “bad” part of me which wanted to feed my sinful desires.

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When I’m scared or down or even humiliated by something in my life, there’s a defiant voice in me that says out loud — in a tone that sounds more like desperation — “I love you!”

I actually always include her name, but that’s not the point here. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s an unconscious pleading of some sort that I can’t explain. Some inner part of me that I don’t control turns to someone’s spirit or image in a child-like way, as though asking for shelter or love or understanding.

I don‘t know exactly when this started, but I asked a psychologist about it and she said she had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. We talked about it quite a bit over a period of weeks. She eventually had an opinion.

“You should listen to this voice,” she said in words that I’m obviously paraphrasing by now. “It seems to me that this is a primal or deep part of you that’s underneath the surface. Just like all of us, you have a lot of competing interests and voices inside — and this is the powerful, authentic voice that needs to be heard when you’re in need. You might not trust her, but you love her and you need her.”

And that was the beginning of my slow education about the competing voices inside me — and that you have inside yourself — which don’t necessarily want the same things.

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When I was about 14 years old, my family moved to a small city with a population of about 12,000 people. I thought we had moved to the end of the world.

I hated Jasper, Ala., for several years and I chafed at feeling stuck there. I had lived in bigger cities before that, places such as Birmingham, Atlanta, Washington, Pensacola and some smaller cities. Not huge places, but big enough that Jasper felt like a greasy spot on an old paper map.

I eventually came to appreciate some things about the city, but it was always a love/hate relationship. By the time I left college for the last time, I left Jasper behind fore good. I soon had no family there, so my only ties were memories of the early triumphs and pains of a teen-ager.

Other than a couple of years when I worked for a newspaper chain that transferred me to two small towns briefly, I’ve been back in Birmingham ever since. I swore I’d never live in a small city again, but I’m rethinking that lately.

In fact, I’d say that if you’re not already giving serious thought to leaving bigger metro areas behind, you’re not thinking very clearly.

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