Hat in hand

After what seems like years of not posting, I'm starting again. If only because it's cheaper than therapy. And if I'm nothing else, I'm a writer. Which I don't say as a matter of self-identity, but more in the sense that i'm subject to all their trappings and weaknesses. So I guess I'll write.

I'm writing again because after years of feeling like I was close to achieving goals, I'm falling short. They seem to be slipping away month to month, and it's getting to the point where it might be healthier to find new goals. They say growing old means realizing how much you don't know. I thought they meant the world but I guess it means yourself as well.

Since I was a kid, I knew we weren't the wealthiest folks in town. I also knew that my parents, for different reasons, we jokes. My father sucked as the social politics of small town America and my mother spent most of her time with her head in the clouds. And I did everything I could then to stop that from happening and certainly to make sure I wouldn't be in the same boat. The short outcome is that everything I did and still do is about perception. And my brain, after all these years, moves in that fashion naturally.

• What does your word choice convey?
• How do you carry yourself? Are you fashionable enough? How is your posture?
• What events are you going to? Are you keeping all of your circles warm? Are you ignoring people?
• How are your career goals? Are you on the right path? If not, why and how do we get back on it?

As you can imagine, this makes relationships hard. Friends must be trusted absolutely to want the same thing and we both must actively help one another at all times achieve higher rungs on whatever the ladder is called that we're climbing. For woman, it's even harder. I don't even think its real what I'm looking for. But a climber absolutely. And if for a second she conducts herself with anything less than raw ambition, she becomes a liability. 

And that, whatever you think of it, is how my brains works. Subsequently, its how I move through the world.

Beyond this, the larger family - the uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents - never got along that well either. Maybe I used to think they should because it would be nice. But whatever the reason then, today it's about power. A united family achieves far more than a divided house. And I've worked like a diplomat to bring them together. Giving a nod to a person's misgivings while sliding in positive images behind it. Constantly building the right image about people that would be reunification possible. Waiting for the next major, "must attend" event to tie up the strands I'd been weaving. And I did it, and I did it well. I'd brought home a woman that everyone loved, and after a number of years, we had built enough of a power structure that everyone could rally around.  We both had solid (not great, but solid) jobs, we'd had a great apartment in a fun neighborhood and I was poised to take the throne on a family that for years never had one. I'd always wanted to be a politician, and I think it came from being forced to be one for years. 

And then things ended and it all went to shit. Being single, a woman at work made advances. Still reeling from the breakout, I passed and she took her grudge to the department where I'm now as polarizing as my family once was. They're closer than they had been, thanks to my brother having a child, but that's a loose family structure. He and the mother are friends, but they aren't together. My brother moved home, and my mother, as it happens, now has ALS (we believe, but the symptoms are there and we're waiting on an MRI.) 

So here we are. At the bottom of the heap again. I feel as if my effort prevents me from achieving goals. The harder I work, the quicker they fall away. And I'm not quite sure how to let go. How, after a lifetime of caring, do I forget everything. It seems to be a piece of what I am. But as I write this, I wonder if making other people a part of what I am is just clouding out my actual interests. Anyway, the point is, I'm not sure where to go anymore, and I'm not sure that going toward where I want is in my best interest. At this point, it seems I should lay down on the sidewalk and try to let myself become gelatin. That seems like the most anti- thing I can do. To just stop being and die off in the minds of those I move toward too fervently. To let the old perception of myself vanish. And if, at that point, I come across them all again, maybe I should be unrecognizable.