I hope you enjoyed the tale from A’nonniemouse that was posted last Monday. Tonight I’ll continue my letter about why I don’t relate to people. How can I when I hardly know who I am? I feel like a teenager trying to discover himself! This is Part 4 of 7 parts being posted on Monday nights. 

You wrote about albinism, since your master Russ is an albino. I want you to know I spend a part of my life as an albino---all cockroaches do! When we’re born we arrive the purest white, as pure a white as you ever have seen. No pigment for us. Fortunately for us German roaches, when our pigment finally develops it comes in the prettiest shades of iridescent browns and oranges, not the drab colors of out other relatives, the other roaches, that are black or brown, such bland and personality-minus coloring. Not only that, us German roaches are long and slender, while our non-descript cousins are round, fat, sometimes huge and usually very ugly! I think I would probably consider self-mutilation or worse if I had to deal with showing myself in public looking like that! And I must tell you, whilst Carolyn was in Buffalo recently there was a picture of an albino robin in the paper. Such beauty rarely falls upon human or roach eyes. Any, white mice are much desired for research, and petology, in institutions like Roswell Park Cancer Research Institute in Buffalo, New York. When Carolyn worked there on specimens of your white mice, she also had several of them as pets. I must say, she treated the guys tenderly, even if she injected the research ones with Harding-Passey melanoma cells, causing them much grief and shortened lives.

But back to my problem. I just don’t know what to do, where to turn, until I decide who I am. How can I hold my head up and participate in roach relationships when I’m so insecure?