Dear Diary, sorry I forgot to write in you for six months again. I don't love JTT any more, I think that he is ugly now!!
Anyway, I'm at work and no one has come in to get adjusted for like 4 hours, allegedly because it's right before the holidays? I wish I could just zone out at a cafe or at my apartment in sweatpants rather than here in dress clothes, but at least I'm getting paid pretty well to sit on my ass and write a blog that no one reads.
Time for some end of year introspection, namely:
This year has been a sorry ass shitty fucking shit storm for almost everyone I know to at least a moderate degree. Just a goddamn bitch ass bitch of a year. I can't even adequately express how bad it's been for a lot of people with curse words, that's how bad it is.
Since life is essentially meaningless and every human action from writing in this blog to getting married and procreating is an attempt to distract from that fact, I'm going to say that it's all of our Saturn Returns. Erin's dad died because of her Saturn return. Jenny's husband died because of her Saturn return. Liam killed himself because of his Saturn return. My dad is going through the worst undeserved professional and legal clusterfuck of his life because of his second saturn return. My mom broke her kneecap and has been immobile for months because of her second saturn return. Does that make us all feel better? No? Ok maybe just saying that it was a shitty year really is better.
Turning thirty has been strange for me. I was very excited for it, I have been for years. I thought turning thirty would mean that I was finally aging into my personality. But this year specifically, I feel like I have lost a measure of confidence and self-contentment that I have always had in the past. I have never felt loneliness before. When I first moved to Portland at 25, I was thrown into an environment where I made quick friendships with cool people immediately, but I didn't want anything to do with it. I didn't want new friends, I wanted to be alone. I couldn't get ENOUGH alone time. I would take off on a walk with my ipod and just walk for hours, all I needed was my legs and the space inside my own head to be fulfilled. There was one night that I actually checked myself into a hotel down the street from my house just to get away from all of my roommates for a night. It was one of the best nights I've ever had.
Now I'm preferring the company of people more and more. I know that enjoying being around people objectively sounds healthier than roaming the streets of portland alone for 4 months, but to someone like me it signals a loss of independence almost. I'm truly ready for a real, lasting relationship for the first time in my life, and now I'm wondering--why am I only ready now. It's not like it's too late, that's not a thing, but compared to the rest of humanity it is LATE. So many of these things make me wonder why I'm like this. Why am I strange. Because I am. It's a personable strange, I've never had trouble making friends and have been blessed with an insane amount of deep, loving, unconditional friendships throughout my life. But in terms of my deepest quirks, the things that a life partner would need to be able to put up with...am I too weird? This past weekend I spent an entire day on the couch watching tv and being mostly silent with a guy who I am currently seeing, who I have technically "known" for a while, who I've thought might be a potential "one" since I first met him, maybe. And for most of the time I was deeply self-concious, because I was like this is something I love to do. An entire day of mostly silent nothing is something that is enjoyable to me as a person. But I felt that he was bored, that I was boring him and the day was boring him. And I hate that. Because I am not going to entertain the person with whom I end up. I'll never be the manic pixie dream girl. I need a person like me, who wants to mostly live inside of their own head, but wants to do it alongside another person. I don't know if that's realistic. I don't know if there's a person for me. It makes people deeply uncomfortable when I say that, so I don't. But it might be true. True intimacy to me isn't sex or deep talks or exposing past pain to the other person--it's sharing silence. And one thing I've learned over the course of my life with my personality is that there are few people with whom you can comfortably share silence. Almost no one, in fact.
So that's my most preoccupying internal crisis currently, which considering some of the aforementioned shit that my friends have been going through doesn't really amount to much. It's still mine though, and it's still valid, I need to try not to forget that.
I'm going home for Christmas in five days. Going home is the best because I don't have to worry. About anything. Because I'm a generally anxious person I can always find SOMETHING to worry about, but it feels like a less grown up worry, because any time I'm home I am immediately 17 years old again and packing to go away to college.
Something I might end up doing at home is spreading my share of Liam's ashes. Because that's where this year has gone, my best childhood friend is suddenly just a few ounces of charred carbon. Just like that. I wonder if I'll ever really get over that. I'm not crying about it every day any more, that stopped a few weeks ago. But I think about it every day. Several times every day. Any time it's quiet really. I don't even really know where to take him. There was a place down in the woods where we would go when he was at my house, a swimming hole, I might put some there. We played in the barn all of the time, some will probably go there. But you can't spread ashes on a feeling. When I was with him I was at Peak Kid--I wasn't worried about a goddamn thing and I was so self-assured and happy and confident in everything that I said and did. That's not a place that you can return to and spread ashes, and maybe that's for a good reason. But I know that he was so incredibly far from there when he died, farther than I ever want to be, that part of me wishes I could lay him to rest in that feeling.
So there's that, my grand update. These aren't constant feelings, usually feelings like this only come out at 3am, when I shoot awake for no reason, fretting about mortality. But damn they are here today, with a vengeance.
