no you can't contain all that rain

I'm trying to think through this set of thoughts and I just keep ending up at dead ends.   To what or to whom do I belong?  Not in a possessing sort of way, but in the way one belongs to families-of-origin or religious groups or other cultural affliations?   (and oh gods do I have a lot of thinky thoughts to have about families of origin that I just keep shoving under the rug because I just can't at the moment)

 

I definitely see myself as not a popular person. I can see popular people from here, I know about their parties and their interactions and their invitations and their online communities and I'm not part of that circle. And it's not really one particular group, I can see it in a couple different directions.

 

But I'm 42, is popular a meaningful term anymore? I'm not exactly comfortable not having a tribe, but nor is it something I think I need to resign myself to.  Which isn't quite the right order to put those words in either.  Not having a (larger) tribe isn't something that necessarily needs correcting, but sometimes I wonder if I'm working towards something more than this. Who knows me, do I need to be known?  Does finding the kind of tribe I want mean different kinds of connections than the kind of connections I prefer? There's a handful of people I'd crawl across broken glass for, or bury a body no questions asked and I love having that fierce sort of love, but I can't imagine feeling that way about everyone.  

 

I think that not being able to talk it through maybe means I haven't been able to think it through, that I'm not as at peace as I think I am.  And I think I might always be reaching for those grapes, straight up Aesop-fablewise, and I'm always going to be pretending I didn't want them anyway, but maybe even if I reached them I still wouldn't really like grapes.  Pretending they're bitter without knowing isn't all that much different from them being bitter, right?

 

I do kind of wish that there was someone to talk to on IM, I miss that part specifically about getting to know new people.  And someone last night said something unbearably achingly sweet about my time at Readercon, and it sort of cemented my desire to wander back into fandom.  (though my event horizon has narrowed to the middle of next week (if I'm lucky) so there's that challenge too).

 

It's getting harder to sort out my feelings about what's about my current situation and what's about me overall, like this hunger for praise and recognition, like this desire for accomplishable goals that stay accomplished and what's just the inevitable fall out from trying to do my best with a weird situation.  I've lost most of my sense of time, everything has this quality of blankness (thanks ED!) (Emily Dickinson, not erectile dysfunction) (I typed that erecticle dysfunction first and am now thinking about icicle problems) like it's always been happening and always will be happening and I know sometimes that's depression talking (and maybe I'm more depressed than I can handle being in touch with at the moment) but not much else to be done, I think.

 

Even writing that feels selfish and grabby, like I'm asking for something I don't deserve because if I deserved/meritted it it would have already come to me.  Which is a crock of shit and I don't actually buy into a fair world fallacy, but my internal stoic is an ass who tells me this over and over again.  And every sentence more I type feels like digging down into this hole of asking.  I told my therapist once that I think I never hated myself more than the day I realized I wanted things that I could not provide myself, that this need for external validation makes me extra vulnerable, and vulnerable means unsafe.

 

I think I've figured out why my progressives aren't really working out for me, my eyes dart around too  much and so I'm always looking out the wrong parts of the classes and making myself headachy and nauseated. I wonder if it's just not a style of glasses that work for hypervigilant people or if I have to finally teach myself that not everything that moves is a threat (ha! even typing that makes my mouth taste like fear so I'm not holding out hope).  I'm pretty sure this means I'm bad and wrong, and my therapist is pretty sure that it just means I might not be suited for progressives.