My best friend and I are taking a break from each other, so it’s been quiet in my inner circle. And with less time and energy to blog due to my workload, it’s a lot of echoing in my head. Which is good because I’m sure there are things that I should keep to myself. Like how sometimes when I’m alone, I indulge myself by looking at the facebook pictures of this guy I know…from 15 years ago. He’s in his 40’s and a handsome guy (the thing I find sexiest about him is how unbelievably nice he is), but back in the day…he would have been the hottest guy I’ve ever seen in real life. A giant of a man, huge warm hands, great handshake, warm, piercing eyes, and great for far-reaching conversations. But one of those untouchable personalities. I think I like looking at his pictures because they’re torturous–if I was meeting the him at 25, I would probably be terrifically intimidated, so who am I kidding. Just one of those untouchables…
Then again, every man is untouchable to me. I don’t know when it was that I lost touch. Lost interest. Lost…connection. Got lost.
My coworkers cornered me last week and asked if I was married. If I had a boyfriend. Why not. I found it interesting how they couldn’t tell I was clearly single since I never talk about anyone, but they said I’m such a happy, open, flirty personality that it distracts from the fact no one knows anything about my personal life. A lot of people say that. I do most of my verbalizing of my romantic aspirations and frustrations here, my missive out to the universe like messages in a bottle, perhaps to the other extension of myself on the other side of time and space. So it’s interesting how much of my feelings and desires and inner life dominate this space, whereas in the world around me, it’s as though they don’t even exist.
They asked me why I’m so mysterious. I don’t know, I said. It’s just perception.
I had dinner with some family friends on Friday. Their oldest son was a couple of years younger than me and is finishing up his PhD on the east coast in computer science. I was telling his mom how smart he is when she said, he’s smart? You’re smart.
Not really, I said. I just fake it well.
Do you remember that time Nick had to interview you for an English paper? He was about 13, in junior high and he had to interview someone about how they were successful so he chose you. And one of the questions he had to ask was how it was that you were able to be successful, and you just said, “Because I’m smart.”
I told her I don’t remember this at all.
Ohhh, she said. Nick remembers. He always got A’s. He never got anything less than A’s. But when he got that paper back, his teacher had written all over that answer, ‘How can this be it? You didn’t work hard on this answer.” And gave him a B. And he was so upset because he said he asked you the question and all you said was “because I’m smart,” and so he wrote exactly that, and because of that, his teacher gave him a B for not putting enough effort into the interview.
I laughed, though I felt kind of bad. That ego of mine. That sounds like me, I said.
Work news. I got my 2nd order. I’m really hoping for a big cluster order to come in this week. A six figure order. I’m heading up a new committee called Strategic Planning, responsibile for creating and roadmapping new products into the company pipeline. I ran my first meeting last Friday, bringing together heads of three departments. Sometimes I’m so scared that I know nothing. That I will fail. But I feel if I’m going to fail, I have to fail going in head first.
Parents decided to take a vacation together to Taiwan/China, and left on Saturday. I had a mild panic. I finally admitted to Bohr something…
I’m terrified all the time. It’s one of the reasons I can’t live close to home. Whenever I’m close to my family, I have a constant anxiety…a constant fear. Of losing them. It’s almost paralyzing. Sometimes in meetings, I’ll look at my mom and I’m so terrified of losing her that tears well up. When my phone runs out of battery at night (I only have a car charger since leaving my wall charger at Aubrey’s earlier in the year), I worry about what would happen if there’s an emergency and I can’t be notified. I can’t stomach medical shows because of all the death and loss. I told Bohr that I worry about my parents traveling together–it’s almost like having the president and vice-president in the same place. And on one hand, I recognize that this anxiety is irrational, that the cycle of life is inevitable, it’s still a constant emotional underpinning. I worry about it every day, spending more emotional time on this fear than I would ever admit.
He asked me if maybe it wasn’t just the loss that scares me, but something else. The reality of my responsibilities–for the company, for my brother. And I thought, yes and no. But it probably is. How much I don’t know. How I’m basically surviving in terms of taking care of myself…how will I be responsible for real responsibilities. Perhaps deep, deep down, I don’t feel like a very worthy human being. I can live in a universe of my own making, but I have not much established myself in the universe of a collective making. Maybe I just never shook the fear that terrorized me in my childhood when I realized how small we all are, how small we can be. Who really has control in a world that is an illusion of stability upon a hurtling rock in constant motion?
Still, it makes me feel safe when people smile around me and tell me I’m such a happy person. It means my connection to the world is intact.