"the invitation's on the page"

 "You are afraid; of being the last at a party without the others, but the others have gone on into a wood they do not understand.  It is the same wood you stand in, weeping. & the trees look at all of you the same, & say nothing."

 

This makes me think of missed cues and how terrified I am of them, to the point of assuming rejection where probably only indifference or preoccupation exist because I'd rather miss out than overstep, than assume something and be wrong.

 

Written out like that, it seems a pretty shitty way to live.  

 

I think it's more of the inherited don't make a mess and know my place that I absorbed growing up.  Even if I'm not meek and conservative like my father would have had me grown up to be, I want to rock as few boats as possible, personally.

 

Which also feels counterintuitive, because I rocked plenty of boats trying to make sure my little brothers grew up as best they could, and I feel like I'm starting to come into my own as an introverted agoraphobic SJW (I'm even beginning to wonder if I want to go into direct service at the partner abuse agency I volunteer with in 2020).   But I also still have this needy monster of a small girl living in my tear ducts and jaw muscles that just desperately wants to be liked and she often believes the best path to being liked, to being invited, is to disguise her neediness and her monstrosity behind as ungrasping a persona as she can manufacture at any given time.

 

In college, I worried I wasn't real unless someone was looking at me.  I worried that language didn't work because I could never know if I was managing to actually communicate the things I was trying to communicate, all the words felt awkward in my mouth and I just gave up for a little bit.  I wanted so many things, so nakedly, and most of them didn't work out for me.  (mind you I was also an overmedicated self-defeating alcoholic with the barest modicum of survival skills) 

 

And now, I want to be naked and reserved, selectively intimate without scaring anyone off with the chasm of need and it's an uncomfortable tightrope and I'm wearing the wrong shoes and i'm always falling off one side or the other.  But at least I'm going down wearing glitter.  

 

It's so much easier to post when I stop worrying so much about making sense  or telling a story.  And it's already way past my bedtime.