The "white coat" was a free-form poem, that I once wrote in high school. I didn't find out its true meaning until after I was many years out of school, though I still remember most of it, in that I felt that it held some deep and yet unknown meaning to me.
if only I'd known then, what I'd later be told by my mother's mother. than I might have been able to have recovered faster, or even had been just had ben shaken less, for the limited idea of self that a child's mind holds. and thus it's ability to heal much easier, than an adult's mind of 35, for that was when I finally learned it's true meaning for me. and if I'd known it's deeper meaning back then, would I have blundered so badly through the many men, that I scared or hurt while I was young, horny, and not even heeding my own thoughts.
that had once given their voices, to have had whispered from the depths of my own mind?

"The coat that you wear, the staff that you bare, the mark that you share.
Shared even with me, to share with others, this mark that we wear.
Though, this mark and this staff, are mine to bear.
I will not mark others, to bear this staff, or wear this coat.
As I am not like you, to share without a thought, or a care.
I will take their stavs, and mend their coats.
Though I wear this mark, it is mine to bare, not I, it's to wear."

When I was 35, my grandmother finally just out of the blue told me, while we'd been talking about all of the things that my own sons had gone through in their young lives, for the fact that my ex-wife and I had been through an ugly divorce.
"your sons will turn out just fine someday despite all of it, as just look at how you turned out, even with how you'd been molested while you'd been sick in the hospital during your second birthday."
To say that I'd been caught off guard, with how'd she just said it as such a simple fact, after I'd asked my mother, and even her mother before that same question in different ways while I had been growing up.
"Did anything happen to me while I was in a place where I couldn't leave, where it was bright or dark, where I'd have been away from my family?"
and then after all of those questions and all of those years, to just hit me with it, when I was still off of my feet for what I was still going through with my ex-wife.
"have you no heart, old woman?"
"have you no sense, at all?"
"how could having been protecting me from that admission for that long, helped me any, to stop right then?"
And it's all too true, knowledge and truth, are just like cats and dogs, once they have fought that long to get out of the bag, they'll never be put back into it again, not ever.
I have had to relearn what it means to simply be me, what I have done, what I have been, in the light of this new, at least to me; fact of my own life.
Thanks but no thanks for protecting me, from part of me, if only you could each be made to see the damage that you'd done, in letting me to have healed without the truth, even after I'd asked for it so many times!

No, I am not really mad, sad, or anything like those, just disappointed with how so many years of over protection left me with a sense of self that could be broken at its base, with just one tactless admission of that truth. and then being left to rebuild my sense of self all over again on my own, or is it really that is the only way that one can rebuild it, on one's own. are we all really self-made, even with so many others around are selves, I can't believe it, I had others to talk to, even if at times that they were both few and far away, I still had them, that fact alone kept me going some days.