My name is Something and I’m a Workaholic
They have meetings for this you know. AA style. So I’m told. I’ve been flirting with checking it out, but I have a sense like its a little bit of a cult and I don’t know if I want to be in a cult exactly. Maybe that’s a dumber reason. Can’t be any dumber than “I’m too busy,” though. But that’s the excuse I give myself, the same excuse I have for not setting foot in my church for a few months now, even though I think all the time how good it would be for me to go.
I am sliding along the edge of my twenties and I wonder, is this a young life crisis? Is this some kind of rite of passage that just has to be gone through; is that all this anxious depression these past few months is really about? Does it have more to do with a biological clock or developmental stage than the details of my life? Or is it I just have a toxic job and so much unhappiness would dissolve so easily if I just moved on, whatever that entails. I have this tension inside of me lately, this SOME CHANGE HAS TO HAPPEN within me, gnawing along the inside of my shoulder blades, pushing me to something, but what? Do I just up and move somewhere? Adopt a kid? Go teach third grade? Join the Peace Corps? Would any of that HELP? Or am I just looking for a distraction from pain that will be there no matter what major adrenalin rush I force into my system with some catastrophic new life for myself?
Blogging is well-suited, for better or worse, to whining, and I feel like I do a lot of whining lately. When I imagine the person I wish I was, I find her far more content. My childhood and my early adolescence were particularly characterized by a drive to be all-tolerant of people and situations, to block any negative opinion about much of anything from coming to even the surface of my consciousness. Certainly I had my criticisms of Sister, but they were well-tempered by guilt I felt over pain I saw her in– and I would have been hard pressed at that time to find a bad word to say about anyone. As I grew older I gravitated towards the opinionated and passionate around me, who I could love with a well-disciplined tolerance and somehow deep down live vicariously through. I learned from them and changed who I was– or maybe, found who I was because of them. I did not own the rules I held for myself exactly, they just appeared and functioned as a sort of endurance test for puritans that I thought I must do well in for some reason. Be perfect. Do well. All the time. But my perfection wasn’t of a Donna Reed variety that got me to create a put-together appearance for myself or to practice a seeming relaxation amidst chaos. Instead it required me not to care how I looked, dressed, was perceived within the strange culture of other teenagers– it required that I pretend not to care if anyone thought I was pretty and in fact to discourage the notion entirely on the basis of its clear frivolity. It required that I be too wrapped up in school, in shows, and in 12 page letters to penpals to participate in my own life in any “normal” way. So I guess some of this life is a matter of habit. But it developed as a strategy for protection from the risk of being disliked, or looked down upon, or seen as interested in meaningless things– I successfully prevented the thought from ever occurring to anyone. So maybe the question has to be, what makes me so fragile that I feel the need for such life paralyzing self-protection?
