The experience of life overwhelms me sometimes. Growing up, fully grappling with concept of human life and its' experience would occassionally send me into the depths of depression. I would sink into darkness caused by despair because I felt like I wasn't doing enough, wasn't doing it right, wasn't doing it good enough. It, in my mind, meaning everything. I wasn't sustaining a meaningful relationship with a guy, I wasn't challenging my mind enough, I wasn't giving back to humanity enough. Looking back, I'm not sure what would have been "enough" to my pre-adult mind; I wonder if winning a Fullbright scholarship would have been enough or sustaining a 2 year relationship would have been the marker of success.

I can't explain when or how I grew out of that mentality; today I wondered if it was just that I felt that despair because I rarely felt feelings growing up, or maybe I felt too many feelings. Maybe it's that I've learned to appreciate the experience, having seen how twisted the hand of fate can be in life.

I think back now, on the Polish exchange student who sat next to me in Alegebra sophmore year. She was miserable, a teenager in a foreign country, struggling to think and speak in a new language and missing her friends and her boyfriend. I remember sitting next to her empty seat in class when she didn't come to school that day, and learning that she would never come to our school or any school every again, she had hung herself in her room the night before. I remember my struggle between completely understanding her choice and also seeing far enough into the future to recognize that she had made the wrong choice.

Teenage suicide, don't do it.

Up until age 30, if I allowed myself to feel it, I felt like a failure in life. I struggled with that feeling frequently, even with my family telling me how proud they were of me, even with the daily encouragement of my friends. No one can change how you feel about yourself except for you.

Like I said, I've changed. I once wrote an entry here, exposing my former self-loathing, disclosing how I spent years walking around and telling myself that I hated me. I remembered when that started, in high school. I saw a friend of mine in the bathroom during lunch. She was anorexic and bulimic, and she had drunk an iced tea for lunch and went into the bathroom to vomit it. We stood side by side at the sinks after, and she stared at her reflection in the mirror and gave herself the finger, shouting fuck you at herself, and that made her laugh.

After college, I spent my 20's measuring myself against unattainable, unmeasurable goals. I didn't know what it was that I wanted to achieve, but I knew I hadn't done it. Nothing I had done was worthy of praise or even cocktail party chatter. I loathed the inevitable, "what's new" because in my opinion, I had nothing to contribute. I was a vaccuous being whereas my friends seemed some much more accomplished.

Today, I see myself for who I am. I'm smart, I am successful, I have a life filled with good friends and family, I am a good person.

I have been tested by life and I responded to the challenge. I have supported friends through hard times - unplanned pregnancies, heartbreak, death in the family. I have sat by a friend as he slowly died, making him smile for a few moments out of his day as he transcended the experience and left it after a good fight.

I took a bus into New York for weeks with a friend to sit by her brother's bedside when he fell with a foreign virus that nearly killed him.

I studied documents about delivering a baby for my friend who asked me to be her stand-by coach in the event that she went into labor while her husband was out of town.

I spent weeks searching for my friend's missing husband after September 11th. I randomly visit message boards for all of the deceased of the attacks that I knew and leave the families messages to let them know that none of them are forgotten.

I volunteered to wait on the table of the man in his final stages of HIV, who used to be assisted by his parents to the beach grill wear I worked for breakfast. I laid my eyes upon his lesioned face as diners and wait staff turned away from it's unslightliness and I treated him with the kindness and simple humor that I treated all customers, but for him I delivered a bathroom key to his table before he was through eating in preparation for the violent diarrhea that would sometimes hit him before he was through a simple meal of eggs and toast.

These are the things I thought about tonight during my ride home. I didn't itemize what I need to do this week or fantasize about a different life, I thought about what I've done in regard to life experience.

I've done a lot. I don't have that feeling anymore that I don't measure up because I'm not rich or famous or a wife or a mother.

I am who I am, and who I am is someone who has experienced a giant piece of life and has learned not to judge but to do. To keep doing my best until I'm not here to do anymore and not a minute sooner.

previous next