I feel a need to write. I also feel blocked from writing. In some ways that is a good thing -- a departure from my normal tendency to come here and spill forth buckets full of unfettered and ill-considered emotional offal in an effort to unburden myself. To simply rid myself of its weight (to limited practical effect, of course).
I am not overwrought. That is good. I am not hysterical. That is better. I am not even sad. Which, truly, is exceptional.
I am just increasingly resigned -- to what is -- and incrementally wistful -- about what is not to be. Generally, just feeling empty. Hollowed out. Which again, may sound dire, but truly is a relief in comparison to the ridiculous hysteria of the preceding six months.
So it was a shock to me that, upon getting notification that my best friend from high school (who was recently married) and his wife are expecting their first child, I had a panic attack in the middle of the food court in which I was standing as I received the email. The shock came, in large part, because I am happy for he and his wife, and, as such, really had very little reason to draw increasingly shallower breaths leading to light-headedness and quickly having to sit down before I passed out unexpectedly.
But it isn't them. It isn't even me really. It is just a side effect of the last vestiges of one of my mental coping mechanisms being dismantled. I had not really realized it, but in recent years, as a mental crutch, I had come to rely pretty significantly on the fact that the majority of people I went to high school and college with were not married or close to it. In the last eighteen months, all of that has changed. Not only does it seem that they are all married, but the vast majority of them are starting families as well. And so I am left to deal with some difficult truths I had long been pushing aside: The number of people in my boat is significantly smaller, and it scares me. There is no strength in numbers anymore. I am officially a left-over, a cast off, a broken toy. The odds of my fulfilling my dreams become exponentially smaller with each passing year. Time is not on my side. And to have come this far and to have been unable to have a grown up and healthy relationship may say a lot about the flawed partners I picked, but it says more about me. As much as I say I want someone to love me, I have pushed away people who have shown me true and sincere affection. It scares me. I don't trust it. I am much more comfortable with rejection. Due to familiarity? A love of martyrdom? Like Shirley Manson, only happy when it rains? Or simply unfamiliar with how to accept love? I realize this because yesterday I was Facebook friended by a person who cared for me a great deal in college. He was a sounding board and I was a rambling and narcissistic complainer. For some reason he liked me. He was impossibly sweet, incredibly smart, emotionally sound, universally well liked, and then (as now) ridiculously good looking. And what did I do? Rejected him romantically at every turn. For three years. Pretty stupid. He is a married surgeon now, still ridiculously good looking, and as far as I can tell still emotionally sound and impossibly sweet (which seems a sort of funny trait for a surgeon, but perhaps that is just too many medical TV shows talking). How did I let a person like that go? At the time, it was easy. There were so many others willing to treat me shoddily -- clearly, I needed to date them instead.
A lifelong theme it seems.
Agh!
And now that I realize my problem (if not its solution, quite yet), as is karmically just, all of the nice guys from my past have moved on -- they are married or engaged. They are starting to build the family life of which I can only dream.
As the favored aphorism of one Hillary Rodham Clinton goes: You must bloom where you are planted. So I must make the best of where I am. Even if this is not the life I wanted, it can be a good one. There may be a part of me that may always carry a sadness for what I can never have, but it does not have to be the majority of my experience. I need to focus on giving back to others in different ways. On moving the focus away from myself. I have spent a great deal of time navel-gazing. It has been -- and can be -- helpful. But it can also be trying and frustrating and scary. I think turning outside of myself and towards trying to be a help to others would do -- at least me -- a lot of good.
I think that would be most productive. I need to make a plan...
