6 August 2019

 The mish-mash of feelings and perceptions:

- I can post stuff to Facebook, yet it feels like it goes unnoticed.

- I can share in a meeting, and yet no one talks about it, afterwords.

- I begin to second-guess myself, asking, "will any of this hold their attention?"

There's so much noise in the air, and so many people want to be heard (to feel important?) and I feel like I'm drowning. You realize that nobody hears a drowning person... or so I've heard it said....??

A feeling that no one puts weight to my words - the wallflower syndrome, if you will? That heart-sinking feeling that no one else wants to take the time to care about me, that we're all trying to be independent little agents....

Now, I realize there's some faulty perception in all of that, some unrealistic expectations of how we should all interact. There's this yearning to be back in high school, where I could hang out most nights of the week with my best friend, playing pool in his garage. There's also this betrayal lingering in the air, when my first girlfriend reconnected with me, one night, only to tell me never to see her again on the next day....

This awful realization that my boundaries are too flimsy, and my obsessions can grow to be too intense (even for my sanity)... this unmet desire to have a small, intimate world when it's really a scary, big unknown...

...and a weird twist in the gut, as I ruminate on my old 90's quote: "How much of our lives is just idle conversation?" ...this feeling that, by choosing not to talk about politics or celebrity, I am taking away other people's safe zones of small talk. ....similarly, by refusting to admit my attractions and lusts, I have pushed myself out of the realm of dating, because I'm no longer "reading the dating scripts"...

and, lurking in the background, there's that information anxiety, where I'd like to join the conversations and yet I'm afraid of appearing the fool, because I don't have the standard collection of relevant facts to refer to - sort of like failing horribly at having a fandom conversation. (we want to share stories, even if everyone present has heard the story - because we want to box present moments up in those stories...? I do not know....)

I scream a muffled scream, as I'm left to be a spectator to how grand and magnificent you all are. After you walk away, I doubt if I had anything worthwhile to say.