"all the time it took to learn to stay"

[omnia_mutantur]

Sometimes I just want to sit down and hammer at my own skull until I figure out the root cause of a hangup or convince myself I'm being an ass well enough to change my behavior  What is this belonging thing I claim I want?  Is it an invitation to all the parties or certain kinds of parties? Is it the ability to be comfortable at parties?  Is it to be less lonely? Is it to have some automatic marker of insider status so indelible that I don't need to perform it ever again?

 

I've never been the most deft at belonging.  I don't have friends from elementary school, from highschool, from Northampton (well, a couple from that last one). I tried to use this with  my therapist as proof of the thesis I'm just a bad person, and so evidence backs up my parents' treatment, I was always unsalvagably damaged.  She was unimpressed and unconvinced.

 

I was probably incapable of having viable relationships while I was drinking.  Now, depending on how you count these things that could go from the summer after eighth grade until my mid to late twenties (which handily maps to most of the aforementioned time periods) or some subset thereof.  This means that all those years all the practice I got at relationships was for a model that I'm not following anymore.  Like practicing basketball to compete in a swim meet or maybe more like practicing burning things down to learn how to construct them.   

 

These aren't excuses, sometimes I'm a crappy friend and it's no one's fault but my own. Sometimes I don't understand how things work when I have no excuse not to. Sometimes I am pointy and uncompromising and don't know how to get out of things I've gotten into. 

 

But I wonder if all these feelings of failure to achieve social comfort or ease are somehow connected, that I've bought this myth or prophecy of being hard to keep and easy to leave wholesale and maybe I think finding a way to belong to a group is a shortcut or an additional measure of safety.   And I don't exactly believe in shortcuts or safety, so believing this thing I can't do will deliver things I don't believe in seems like maybe asking a little much from a loosely affliated group of people.  And Abundance says I can't get in service relationships with organizations, so there's that too.

In other news,  my brain has been spitting out these strange variations on that quatrain about brides all day, and I think this one is the closest to today's mood

 

something borrowed, something blue

something wistful, something true 

 

Comments

[sabotabby]

I feel ya. I get the sense that people would forget me if I were silent for more than a week on social media. Objectively this probably isn't true, but that's how I feel.