Alone and Unobserved

Remember how I went to bed super-crazy-early on Sunday night, and then got up super-crazy-early Monday morning? And then decided this was going to be the beginning of a New Me who got to bed at a reasonable hour and got up early and was always cheerful and rested? (You may not remember that last part because I don’t think I recorded it or communicated it to anyone else.)

Yeah, despite my lofty ambitions, my body is having none of it. Even though I went to bed exhausted at 10:30 last night (not quite as crazy-early as 6 or 7 but still a good two hours before I usually hit the hay) I tossed and turned and dreamed terrible dreams about being on vacation with my family (nakedness! lost towels! DIRTY CLOTHES) and when my alarm went off at 7 this morning I woke feeling like I’d never slept and I snarled and groaned and cursed and wished death and destruction on all and sundry.

It is now 2:30 in the afternoon and I’m still not awake. I’ve been at work since nine, answering reference questions, dispensing advice, scheduling library programs and signing forms—all in a nightmarish somnambulant state where every other moment I expect my mother to walk up and ask me if I want to see the Labyrinth of Steamy Corridors again, and where are my pants? don’t I know I’m in PUBLIC? and am I ready for my choir performance?

I really don’t know what the answer is to my sleep/nightmare problems, but I do know that I already wandered the Labyrinth of Steamy Corridors (and Naked Overweight Men) once and I have no interest in doing it again, but thank you for asking, Mom, and would you please stop stealing my pants I believe we’ve talked about this.

I was reading Dooce’s most recent post, a letter to herself on turning “four hundred and twenty months old” entitled “That old hag.” And I was like, oh, fun, let’s plug that into the Google search bar and let it do the math for me to find out how old she is. So I typed in “420 / 12″ (boy does Google have some fun suggestions for people who type in “420,” by the way) and up pops… “= 35.”

After I calmed down a bit I did the math myself, and it turns out Heather Armstrong was born in 1975, which makes her a little less than five-and-a-half years older than me. It doesn’t seem possible that someone who was born in 1975 would be turning thirty-five this year. I mean, 1975 is RECENT and thirty-five is OLD.

In other, related news, a couple days ago I called home and spoke with my dad about possibly coming home in November so I could be there for my birthday, his birthday and Thanksgiving.

“Do you guys have anything planned for then?” I asked, meaning “Do you have any (i.e., out-of-town, not-going-to-be-home-for-a-visit plans) for that period?”

And my dad looked at my mom’s big calendar where she writes down absolutely everything and he was like, “Nope! The only thing on here is

And then he asked what that horrible strangled, kicked-in-the-gut noise coming from my end of the line was.

Which is all a long way of saying

Some of my older friends (i.e., the ones who are in or past their thirties and are not too happy with my moaning and gurgling that thirty is “the edge of decrepitude”) have tried to reason with me, saying that their thirties are/were their favorite age—not a kid anymore, but not yet an old fart.

My problem isn’t really that thirty feels “old.” I don’t think thirtysomethings are decrepit (or at least I wouldn’t say so to their faces) and I don’t think I’m immediately going to start experiencing joint pain and stiffness and hair loss (who am I kidding? I suffer from all of those already) immediately after my birthday.

But thirty does feel like the end of my life as a kid. I’ve been a kid for years, it seems. Avoiding responsibility, playing and goofing off whenever I wanted to, eating unhealthy food, spending my money on random shit. Thirty-year-olds don’t seem like old fogeys, but they do seem like ADULTS.

And I don’t know if I’m ready to be an adult yet.

[Updated because I apparently cannot do arithmetic of any kind. Like that's a surprise. I'm OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.]

Linda over on All & Sundry wrote a post about how hard it is for her to make and keep friends. The paragraphs that really hit me were numbers 2 and 3:

I don’t have many friends, really. I am shy and reserved and I find it hard to accept the inherent vulnerability that comes with friendships and I’m not good at maintaining them and I’m terrible at reaching out and sometimes I wonder there’s something fundamentally broken in me in this regard.

I fill this friend-shaped void with the internet and I don’t really know if that’s sad or sensible, if I’m a pathological dork or someone who’s just making connections where she can.

Judging by how many friends I currently have, and by the fact that I don’t spend every weekend lost and lonely, I must not be as bad at making friends as I think (although it does seem to me that my friends work harder at being friends with me than I do at being friends with them). And I have enough friends of different kinds in this area that I probably don’t need to spend any weekend alone, if I’d just send a few texts or make a few phone calls.

But, haha! that’s where the “I may be broken” part comes in. I’ve mentioned this before: when I go out and do things, it never occurs to me to invite other people. Sometimes (a lot of the time, actually) I want to be alone, but if one of my friends calls me when I’m feeling introverted, I have no problem saying I’m not up to it, call me next time. And yet somehow I assume my calling and suggesting activities, or asking if anything’s going on, is a tremendous imposition to my friends.

I’m not sure how to get over this. One problem is that I don’t understand social cues. People don’t say what they mean, you guys. I certainly don’t! But I know when I’m lying to be polite, and I’m never certain if the “Call me soon so we can hang out!” coming from someone else is the literal truth, a polite lie, or is true now but won’t be true next weekend.

Also, I don’t understand “hanging out.” I don’t understand “getting together.” I don’t understand “let’s get lunch.” These are all completely foreign concepts to me. Because, you know, they involve other people, and their schedules, and their dietary restrictions, and their interests, and their personalities.

Hanging out and getting lunch with myself (and the internet!) is just so much easier.

What I want to know is, how do writers who write for a living deal with the constant rejection? Because I’m not good with it. I’ve mostly structured my life around avoiding potential rejection and failure: I don’t ask guys out because they might say no; I only apply for jobs I’m clearly overqualified for; and I publish my writing on my own website because I can be confident I’ll never send myself a politely crushing note that uses phrases like “doesn’t fit our needs” to disguise the stunning blow-between-the-eyes it actually is.

I went through a brief, optimistic phase a couple years ago where I was going to start writing seriously, and the way I remembered it was I chickened out because I was intimidated by all the different submission requirements each market had. But now it’s coming back to me: I submitted a story to a cool-sounding self-published anthology and was rejected. And I was crushed, and all my optimistic plans fell apart quite immediately and decisively, and I went back to maybe writing a little story every once and a while and posting it to this website.

I’ve wanted to be a published writer for almost literally my whole life, and maybe literally the whole of my life that I have any recollection of. But am I cut out for it, really? I seem to be missing some necessary component—thicker skin, or unshakeable self-confidence, or a volcano-like drive to see myself published—that successful writers have.

I’ve always been good at what I wanted to do. (Put a different way, I usually wasn’t interested in stuff I wasn’t good at. SEE: Chemistry.) So I’m not sure how to deal with this drive I’ve been feeling the last few months to take photos and write poetry and draw with pencils and charcoal and pastels, none of which I’m good at AT ALL IN THE LEAST BIT. I’m not used to trying to do things that stymie me.

Frustration!

Maybe this shows that my character is improving, since I keep trudging doggedly on (stopping every two seconds to bitch and whine, of course), writing ghastly poems about love and loss and drawing laughably indecipherable pictures of kitchen chairs. I find it hilarious that I have more determination to Create Art than I do to beat video games, when I’m equally bad at both and video games are usually assumed to be more “fun.”

Am I broken? Is there medicine that can fix this?

I’m almost 100% moved into my new place. Over the past week I’ve slowly found room for most of my things, and thrown out what I don’t need and don’t have room for. I’m a hoarder by nature, so this is an agonizing process, but the lack space and storage in this apartment has forced me to be firm and steely-eyed when it comes to making hard decisions about whether or not to keep that six-year-old button-up shirt that never looked good on me, or whether to toss the six mostly-empty complimentary bottles of eyeglass cleaner scattered across my desk and bureau.

On the other hand, I’m deeply regretting the decision I made to leave behind all my shitty second-hand appliances, cookware and flatware when I moved out of my next-to-last apartment a year and a half ago. Basically, if my roommate had a better version of something, I ditched it—which worked great while we were sharing a living space, but, it turns out, not so great now that we’ve parted ways. I’ve quickly discovered that a shitty, low-quality toaster/microwave/spoon/frying pan is better than none at all, especially when the only food you have in the house is bread, microwave popcorn and cold cereal. So last night I splurged and spent a staggering (to me, anyway) amount of money on shelving and what I decided to call necessities, which means I’ll have slightly more storage space and stuff to fill it with.

Oh, and I’ll be destitute for the rest of my life. There’s that.

In other, related news, I’m still not quite used to living on my own again. I’m a fairly nervous individual in general, and when I spend a lot of time alone (especially the long hours of the evening and night) I tend to get a little… skittish. It hasn’t yet gotten to the same dire extremes as the first time I tried it, but I am still more nervous than I was two weeks ago, more sensitized to unexpected noises, and more aware of how easy it would be to break into my apartment to burgle it/murder me in my sleep. I was hoping the SSRI my doctor prescribed would temper my anxiety but I’m beginning to wonder if that is (or will ever be) the case. I don’t want to have to take a Xanax every time I’m going to be at home, but I’m worried about what my other option would be. (I.e., continual stark terror.)

Of course, in the best tradition of librarians everywhere, I can always turn to wine and bourbon to calm my nerves.

UPDATED: Fixed a sentence fragment in the fourth paragraph that went nowhere and then stopped dead. So embarrassing.

So tired. So, SO tired. I’m not sure if it’s depression (in which case, why the hell am I taking an SSRI) causing the somnolence and unrefreshing sleep, or if it’s the unrefreshing sleep that is causing daytime caffeine overconsumption which is disturbing my sleep. Or stress? In any case, it sucks.

In other news, my friend Brandy gave me a box of pastels she wasn’t using anymore (I believe the exact phrase she used was “I’m so over pastels”) and good grief, they’re hard to use. I’ve developed some intuition for graphite pencil drawing, but add color into the mix and I have no idea what I’m doing. No clue. I’m also hopeless at charcoal drawing, for reasons possible related to the fact that charcoal feels like Art, and I am not an Artist.

I’ve had an off-and-on urge to write poetry over the past few months, and when I told my coworker (who has much more discerning taste regarding literature than I do) she recommended Steve Kowit’s poetry workbook In the Palm of Your Hand. So if you’ve noticed I’ve been posting a large number of poems lately, it’s because I’ve been working through his book. Also: I’m really, really sorry to foist my poetry on you. If you were scarred by unexpectedly viewing an infelicitous verse, I apologize and recommend you tread carefully on this website (or in the RSS feed) in the future.

P.S. Don’t even ask how my fitness program is going. If that answers any questions you might have on that score.

Sometimes a guy will walk past me (it could be anywhere, but we’ll pretend we’re in a coffee shop) and I’m instantly 100% certain he’s gay. I also notice that he’s cute. Not quite as cute as I am, but I’m willing to overlook that, because I’m a big person that way.

And then he doesn’t even glance at me. Not even once! I watch him closely for the next three hours, and he blithely continues sipping his coffee and leafing through his magazine as if he is completely unaware of my existence.

What, does he think he’s too good for me? Is he deluded about his own looks and doesn’t realize I’d be doing him a favor by dating him? WHY WON’T HE ACKNOWLEDGE MY CONDESCENSION.

It all ends, of course, with me walking up to him, slapping the coffee out of his hand and shouting something about how “it’s YOUR loss, BITCH. We could’ve HAD SOMETHING.” And then I go home and listen to Morrissey and post something angsty and emo on my LJ. Through my tears.

Writing is hard work, you guys. And I have no self-discipline when it comes to making myself do things that are hard. (See: piano practice, homework, exercise, not overeating, being nice when I’m in a bad mood, etc.) Right now I’m trying to write a short story that I was totally excited about (to the point of waking up and grabbing my iPhone and writing down the concept when it came to me in the middle of the night) but now that I’ve realized it’s not going to write itself like some of my ideas do (and now you’re muttering “That explains a lot about your writing…” to yourselves) I’ve lost a lot of my enthusiasm.

I read the blogs and follow the Twitter feeds of several writers—Margo Lanagan, Patricia C. Wrede, Neil Gaiman, Diane Duane, to name a few—and of all of them only Wrede has really managed to convey to me how much like a job being a writer is. Like a sucky, grinding job where you’re self-employed and alone all the time and you have to pay taxes and budget your time and, basically, everything I’m bad at rolled into one.

*sigh*

Anyway, my childhood (and teen and young-adult and adult) dream of being a full-time professional writer is looking less and less reasonable. Maybe I’ll eventually write something publishable, and maybe I’ll eventually make some small amount of money selling what I write, but…

God, I’m such a wuss.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to be feeling the therapeutic effects of my antidepressant/anti-anxiety medication only two weeks after starting it, but I think I am. I’m 100% certain I’m experiencing the side-effects, at least, and if the accompanying sustained good mood is just a placebo effect I’ll take it, by god.

Maybe in about ten years I’ll be stable enough to consider a relationship. I want one right now, or I kind of do (see this post if you’re wondering what “kind of” means). But I think I need to learn to be happy by myself before I’ll be able to be happy with someone else. Before I can be with someone else and not cynically undermine their happiness.

I’m not as fucked up as some people, and I should probably be grateful for that—but grateful to whom? to my parents, because they weren’t as destructive and dysfunctional as they could have been? to the Mormon church, for not quite succeeding in driving me to suicide? to my ancestors, for “only” bequeathing ADD, depression and anxiety to me, along with a history of any number of fatal illnesses? to a deity I don’t believe exists?

On the subject of god: Losing my religion six or seven years ago did leave a void in my life that I don’t think I’ve completely filled. I should be honest with myself about this. It removed an enormous source of anxiety, self-hatred and confusion—I hardly notice my OCD tendencies anymore, for instance—but it effectively alienated me from my family, my (then-) friends, my social network. Maybe just as importantly, with my religion I lost my purpose in life, and, while I’ve tried, I don’t think I’ve completely replaced that.

Do I want to be a librarian for the rest of my life? Probably not. And even if I did, is that compelling enough to be a “life purpose”? What does “life purpose” mean to me, anyway, and do I really need one? Have people in general been so hypnotized by the hollow promises of religion that they feel meaningless and hopeless unless they replace it with something equally life-consuming?

What say you all? Do you need a “purpose,” and if so, have you found it?