"Is it something you should know"

Among the many kinds of depression and anxiety I specialize in is the kind where I can simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs without very much mental dissonance.  I can somehow I believe that I am not very special and that I am uniquely unsuited to human interaction.

My therapist continually refuses to humor me when I want to check my responses against how normal people work.  Do normal people make themselves elaborate rules about how often they're allowed to seek out other people's company/conversation?  Do people tell themselves stories to explain other people's behavior or do they just get to not think about it? 
 

I couldn't quite get my words to line up in sentences last night, which was deeply annoying if not especially unusual.   friday was a decent day, I saw Spark and Delight, I finished the metallic thread part of my current project, I watched a bunch of Bunheads and then Light and I ordered Mexican food and watched more disney fairy tale weddings because we know how to party. 
 

Some of the rhetoric in the show is focusing on how long these people have been dreaming of their wedding, and how "every little girl" does.  Now, I know most of my childhood memory is crap, there may be many things I've forgotten dreaming about, and most of the memories left to me are either stories I've been told, stories I've been telling long enough to wear grooves that the memories can run along.  But I don't remember dreaming of getting married.   And when three people in a row half-proposed to try to get me to stay in my early-to-mid twenties, it always seemed like a Really Bad Idea.  
 

And maybe it was mostly that my image of married people was pretty much limited to my parents, which wasn't exactly something I wanted to model.  And there were so many other things I remember about growing up that made me feel alien or broken, it doesn't surprise me I missed out on this.  (which makes me wonder, if my father's first response to me getting into my dream school was that it was an expensive husband-hunt, why didn't I ever internalize the message that that was my goal?  was it just by the time it became relevant, I was already determined to be dead by the end of college and so it seemed irrelevant?  Did I consider myself so unlovable that it was basically the equivalent of going to the moon?

 

I'm headed to bookgroup this evening, which means that for the first time since surgery, I am putting all my jewelry back on.  Which makes me long for my tragus piercing, which incidentally makes me long for a life that involves recreational piercing.  And I feel like I should somehow spread out body modifications, like if I'm getting a tattoo in April, I probably shouldn't get pierced in March.  

 

I bought myself a makeup mirror in case one of the things I wanted to do with my convalescence was practice putting on eyeliner.  I really wish that looking at my face didn't give me that car sick feeling, but it really is easier to practice with a mirror that magnifies and doesn't require that I lean across a sink.  It's given me the opportunity to examine, at length, the scar everyone else tells me they can't see which was probably not my best idea but I have a lot of those, especially when feeling sorry for myself. 

 

Light's gone to a coworker's party tonight, Abundance is still in NC, and I don't really try to intrude on Delight's weekends anymore.   Maybe it's pie-making time?  Audiobooks and cross-stitch?  (spoiler: i curled up in bed with a kitten and read)  Sometimes, there's this feeling of bad-assery mixed in with the taste of failure that a Saturday evening home alone leaves in my mouth.   I know it's not a failure, I know that in part it's just that I don't scramble hard enough, preferring tattered dignity or the like, I know that it's a leftover feeling from years and years ago, before i had a house, before I had hobbies that didn't live in the bottom of a bottle, before I could just sit with myself.  So, sure, I get fidgety and restless sometimes, I wonder what I'm not doing right, but I'm also pretty good company for myself.  And of course, it's half bravado but at this point, what isn't?