After a lifetime of believing that pleasing others of higher authority was central to his success in life, the retired teacher who had behaved horribly to his students, and those he deemed inferior, became depressed and critical of others but could not submit to a therapist so he picked an interesting person on line to be a secret mentor of sorts but deny the mentor had any of the views that he sought to emmulate and simultaneously quenched his thirst to critisize. The mentor recognized the familiar pattern and wrote about 'his' alcoholic father with a penchant for remembering jokes. He described the father as a scrappy miner with a hard life. The retired teacher was so surprised of the similarities to his own life that when he went to critisize what he knew to be true about himself, his depression turned into an epiphaney of joy like Scrooge on Christmas morning.

Sometimes the lies we tell ourselves,
even if its a lie about the truth,
is what ties us all together.