So what else is new?
In two days I’ll be 41. I’m not happy about that. It’s not that I’m upset about getting older. I’m more upset that the number keeps going up but I never seem to actually feel like I’m anywhere near it. I’m a child not even playing at being an adult. I just don’t see the purpose in pretending to be something that I’m not.
It makes me feel so isolated. I’ve heard other people talk about not feeling their age but in my case it’s different. I honest to goodness don’t feel like I’ve aged any psychologically since I was 12. As such all of the things that adults are allowed and even expected to do? I can’t do them. I’m not an adult. I’m not allowed to. And when people expect such things of me? I shut down and/or run and hide. I can’t do or be those things no matter how hard I or others may want it of me.
As I continue to age and… not… age… I feel more and more confused. The cognitive dissonance of being a child old enough to suffer from a mid-life crisis feels so very, very wrong. The fact that I’ve lost most of my hair isn’t helping either. I look old and tired. Ugly. I’ve always been ugly. Inside though, I just feel tired. Exhausted really. I don’t feel so old but at the same time I do.
Let me try to explain a bit better: I’ve always been older than my age. When I was a kid, a teenager specifically, I always acted much older than I was. I used to bang on the wall between me and my brother’s room yelling for him to turn his damn music down. I cleaned obsessively. So much so that I would purposefully leave certain things messy in an attempt not to appear crazy. Thinking about it now, that kind of makes me crazy. But that’s how I was, that’s what I became about the time I started puberty. Everything had to be perfect and yet nothing could be.
I remember once when my nephew came over to visit. He said something to me that still sticks with me today. He told me that my room looked like a monk lived in it. It was neat, tidy, and sparse, just as I liked it. I had no idea just how odd that apparently was. I felt unbelievably embarrassed. My attempt at playing being a person had failed. If even my nephew could see through me it would obviously be even easier for anyone else.
So tired. Beginning to lose the plot here. I lost the person I wanted to be a long time ago. I gave up. It was the best I felt I could do. Being an adult meant being something I couldn’t understand. Being a child meant being something that I never really was. Walking through limbo. Struggling through the shadows of what others expected of me, what I expected of myself. I want to burn it all away. Scatter the ashes to the winds.
So tired.
So very, very tired.
quixoticsomnia 