This is the week, one way or another, I need to move on. My Replacement starts tomorrow and I’m handing over my keys. There are a million stupid loose ends, projects half-done that I feel guilty leaving in her hands– but she is, after all, being paid for it and I won’t be. I am sad and resentful, and I’ve shouldered the worry about that place for so long it’s very hard to release it. I don’t regret quitting, I just regret the sadness I feel over it and the fact that I couldn’t change what I wished to change there.
I saw the Doctor today. I feel like I had the same conversation with her that I’ve been having for the past 15 years– the wtf is wrong with me conversation. I am ashamed– honestly, ashamed– to be in this stage of life and never had so much as a boyfriend. It feels with each passing year that the shame in this intensifies. I want more. But my fear has always gotten in the way. Or that’s what She says, anyhow. With the Job slipping away and the Holidays over, I have more time to think and more space to feel, more space to notice my unhappiness. She seems to think if I could just get miserable enough I would take on that fear, take whatever risks are required to change my situation. She guesses that, outside of my very close friends no one would even see that I am “looking”– maybe I don’t know how to admit I’m looking because I can’t handle the chance that looking won’t make a difference, in the way that I can’t say I want to go to the gym more to lose weight because I can’t handle the commitment of saying that’s something that matters to me. I don’t think I was raised to want things for myself. I was raised to want things for other people. And to look down on anyone who wanted things as superficial as to look attractive, to get felt up, or to have attention. I’ve spent my life acting as though I were too fulfilled by so many other things to care about what wasn’t there. I don’t know how to invite anyone else in. If it all comes down to fear, why has it so paralyzed my life? And what possibility is there for it to be conquered?
So yeah. I have a little time on my hands now and it looks like wading through some pain will be part of it. I’m hoping some insight and change will come of it all, but I guess we’ll have to see.
