second-rate heart

In just about a week, it will be four years since I left college, the same amount of time I spent there.

It doesn't feel like it has been that long since I was there, in a different city, with different friends. With different priorities and a completely different outlook. Another personality. Another life.

I have been horribly homesick for my friends there in the recent months. I have been nostalgic for the first two or three years I was there, for warm rainy days in late spring, afternoons spent sitting on my second-floor balcony talking on the phone. Many of my memories are sensory rather than events, and it's the smell of wet black spring earth, the color of shockingly bright new green grass and small leaves against dark wet branches, that I've been daydreaming about so much. It is always afternoon, and I think of walking down the street after these rains. Everything is wet and lukewarm, and there is a smell in the air of something changing. The brick houses are wet and old, the sidewalks are broken and uneven, and bus engines are echoing through the concrete cavity of the wet busway below my street.

When I think of that sound of the lightest rain on the balcony roof, sitting down there with the cat looking out between the wood slats at the tree branches even with the height of the floor, waiting for my then-boyfriend to get home from work on a Friday evening so we can cook dinner and fall asleep in the living room: it is so nostalgic that it hurts. It makes my heart lonely for an imaginary social world I had there, then. When I lived there, in reality, I remember being miserable. The place didn't suit me and I never felt comfortable. I was often feeling loney and displaced and unhappy. But I miss being on those streets with my friends, and feeling that warm easy comfortableness of just being together with them, with nothing needing to be planned or said.

I don't have that here yet and it is frustrating to feel like I have no one to call when I just want to talk for no reason; or worse, when I want to talk for a reason that is weighing on me.

Anyway.

I have been so nostalgic for this sensory moment and this assumption of a safe network of friends, and yet when I stopped to think about it, I barely recognize myself then. I try to remember what I had been thinking; I go back and read my old journals, my old emails, try to imagine my old mentality. I am surprised to find that I am nothing like what I was four years ago, two years ago, even nine months ago.

What surprises me even more is that despite the fact that I feel so separated and detached from my past, like I have been dislodged so thoroughly from the environment of my childhood, is that I feel closer emotionally to who I was as a teenager than who I was last summer.

Why?

I turned this thought over and over in my head as I fell asleep last night, and came back to one of the reasons that I began this project in the first place. I have felt profound loss lately, in many respects: loss of love, loss of support, loss of my family and my home. But the biggest loss by far is a loss of identity. It is not a recent loss, but one that I have only recently realized consciously. The loss began so long ago that I hesitate to call it that, only because I am not a big believer in a constant core of self that one carries along over a lifetime. Loss implies that I had that core, I misplaced it, and I have retrieved it. I think it is rather that I have returned to a situation and an emotional place that I have not felt in nearly ten years.

The situation is one of loneliness, and I mean that in the most neutral way possible. I am in a loneliness that comes from not being in a long-term relationship that automatically colors my plans, my day, my desires, my fears, and my self. It is a loneliness that forces one to stop and think: what do I want to do? What do I want to do with today, with my summer, with my evening, with my life? And unlike the past eight years, I no longer have the determining factor of a significant other. I am the only one who can make these decisions, and this is not something I am used to anymore.

I realize more and more that, as I wrote already, the fact of a long-term serious boyfriend has meant that I change myself according to my view of what he would want, before he has a chance to ask. I am not blaming anything on the people I have dated, that they tried to change me. Rather, I did it myself out of fear that what I was already was not enough, or it was not right, or it was too much. I did this completely without realization of what I was doing. It was only after the fact, when I was suddenly alone and found myself utterly destroyed, that I realized it was not just the relationship that had done it. It was my own desire to change, to be the ideal for someone else.

I was so subsumed in this, and it was so unconscious, that my realization now of what was happening has made me into a completely different person. I am becoming confident in myself again, in a way that I hadn't been since high school. I had been wondering for years: what happened to that confident girl? And it makes me scared in the pit of my stomach to realize that I had buried her underneath layers of uncertainty and insecurity, layers and layers of self-doubt.

Now that I am emerging from behind those layers, trying as hard as I can to push them off, I am forced to return back to a point before this had begun, and I think that is why I can identify with my teenage self, the one who had not yet developed an insecurity about being desired and being loved. And these layers of rotting detrius that I am trying to push away are so heavy that I don't know if I could do it without the knowledge that there is, in fact, a self-identity I can try to get back to (or go forward with) that is something other than the attempt to be someone else's ideal.

second-rate heart
blog archives	Wednesday, April 18, 2007 In just about a week, it will be four years since I left college, the same amount of time I spent there. It doesn't feel like it has been that long since I was there, in a different city, with different friends. With different priorities and a completely different outlook. Another personality. Another life. I have been horribly homesick for my friends there in the recent months. I have been nostalgic for the first two or three years I was there, for warm rainy days in late spring, afternoons spent sitting on my second-floor balcony talking on the phone. Many of my memories are sensory rather than events, and it's the smell of wet black spring earth, the color of shockingly bright new green grass and small leaves against dark wet branches, that I've been daydreaming about so much. It is always afternoon, and I think of walking down the street after these rains. Everything is wet and lukewarm, and there is a smell in the air of something changing. The brick houses are wet and old, the sidewalks are broken and uneven, and bus engines are echoing through the concrete cavity of the wet busway below my street. When I think of that sound of the lightest rain on the balcony roof, sitting down there with the cat looking out between the wood slats at the tree branches even with the height of the floor, waiting for my then-boyfriend to get home from work on a Friday evening so we can cook dinner and fall asleep in the living room: it is so nostalgic that it hurts. It makes my heart lonely for an imaginary social world I had there, then. When I lived there, in reality, I remember being miserable. The place didn't suit me and I never felt comfortable. I was often feeling loney and displaced and unhappy. But I miss being on those streets with my friends, and feeling that warm easy comfortableness of just being together with them, with nothing needing to be planned or said. I don't have that here yet and it is frustrating to feel like I have no one to call when I just want to talk for no reason; or worse, when I want to talk for a reason that is weighing on me. Anyway. I have been so nostalgic for this sensory moment and this assumption of a safe network of friends, and yet when I stopped to think about it, I barely recognize myself then. I try to remember what I had been thinking; I go back and read my old journals, my old emails, try to imagine my old mentality. I am surprised to find that I am nothing like what I was four years ago, two years ago, even nine months ago. What surprises me even more is that despite the fact that I feel so separated and detached from my past, like I have been dislodged so thoroughly from the environment of my childhood, is that I feel closer emotionally to who I was as a teenager than who I was last summer. Why? I turned this thought over and over in my head as I fell asleep last night, and came back to one of the reasons that I began this project in the first place. I have felt profound loss lately, in many respects: loss of love, loss of support, loss of my family and my home. But the biggest loss by far is a loss of identity. It is not a recent loss, but one that I have only recently realized consciously. The loss began so long ago that I hesitate to call it that, only because I am not a big believer in a constant core of self that one carries along over a lifetime. Loss implies that I had that core, I misplaced it, and I have retrieved it. I think it is rather that I have returned to a situation and an emotional place that I have not felt in nearly ten years. The situation is one of loneliness, and I mean that in the most neutral way possible. I am in a loneliness that comes from not being in a long-term relationship that automatically colors my plans, my day, my desires, my fears, and my self. It is a loneliness that forces one to stop and think: what do I want to do? What do I want to do with today, with my summer, with my evening, with my life? And unlike the past eight years, I no longer have the determining factor of a significant other. I am the only one who can make these decisions, and this is not something I am used to anymore. I realize more and more that, as I wrote already, the fact of a long-term serious boyfriend has meant that I change myself according to my view of what he would want, before he has a chance to ask. I am not blaming anything on the people I have dated, that they tried to change me. Rather, I did it myself out of fear that what I was already was not enough, or it was not right, or it was too much. I did this completely without realization of what I was doing. It was only after the fact, when I was suddenly alone and found myself utterly destroyed, that I realized it was not just the relationship that had done it. It was my own desire to change, to be the ideal for someone else. I was so subsumed in this, and it was so unconscious, that my realization now of what was happening has made me into a completely different person. I am becoming confident in myself again, in a way that I hadn't been since high school. I had been wondering for years: what happened to that confident girl? And it makes me scared in the pit of my stomach to realize that I had buried her underneath layers of uncertainty and insecurity, layers and layers of self-doubt. Now that I am emerging from behind those layers, trying as hard as I can to push them off, I am forced to return back to a point before this had begun, and I think that is why I can identify with my teenage self, the one who had not yet developed an insecurity about being desired and being loved. And these layers of rotting detrius that I am trying to push away are so heavy that I don't know if I could do it without the knowledge that there is, in fact, a self-identity I can try to get back to (or go forward with) that is something other than the attempt to be someone else's ideal. posted by m 0 comments 10:20	i am the ghost of who i used to be. contact me: leave a comment. i apologize but want to remain anonymous and posting my email address here would make me unduly anxious about my privacy.