Month: September 2016

Ordinary People

Posted on by SomatiCat

“What do you want to be?”  I asked my date.   We were just shy of 20 years young.

“I want to be an ordinary person,” the young man said.

“???”  I didn’t get it.  When you are a teenage boy or girl, don’t you want to be an outstanding, extraordinary, prominent person even when you don’t know in what.  Somebody but an ordinary person.

Several decades have passed since and I had a chance to see the boy again at a class reunion.   I told him I now understood what he meant by being ordinary and appreciated him for his wisdom at such a young age.

“Did I say such a deep thing?”  the boy, now a man in fifties, said.

I should have chosen this ordinary guy instead of a succession of overgrown permanent teenagers, who were exciting and extraordinary in not necessarily good ways as a partner.

I am not outstanding, extraordinary or prominent, but I think my life was nothing but ordinary.   After decades of turmoil, now I find myself living a very ordinary life with absolutely no drama.  And I am mostly content with my ordinary life as an ordinary person. Then once in a while, I look back and say to myself, “It was fun.”

It must be just a state of one’s mind.

 

Lifeline

Posted on by SomatiCat

I have never been prescribed meds for anxiety.  I have had severe anxiety but it was always a precursor or aura of major depression.  When I experienced anxiety attacks, I was already on the way to major depression and almost immobile.

I am one of the lucky few.  After years of psychotherapy, a straightforward generic SSRI and Crossfit have been working for me and I haven’t experienced a major depression for several years.

Still every night for a couple of seconds before I fall asleep, I feel anxiety.  It’s about nothing and everything.  It’s about being.  Suddenly I have a hole in my chest and I feel like I am being sucked into the hole in my chest into a heavy black mass of nothingness.  I know if I allow it happen, I will lose my sleep and fall straight down to the bottomless depression.

So I reach out and hold the tail of my dog sleeping next to me, as if it were a lifeline.  My 80lb 12 year old mutt’s tail is thick and feels substantial, warm and alive.  I feel tethered to his life.   And I fall asleep.

 

Yearbook

Posted on by SomatiCat

When I went home to attend my father’s funeral, I found my junior high yearbook.  I recognized faces of girls I haven’t seen for many decades.  One by one, they came back to life in my memory.  I knew those teenage girls.  They looked exactly as I remembered.   I turned pages looking for my photo.  I couldn’t find it.  I felt confused.  I was sure I was in the yearbook.  I started back from the first page.  Page after page, the faces of girls got clearer in my memory.  I still couldn’t find my face.

On the third try, I finally found my name under a photo.  She was a beautiful teenage girl.  I didn’t recognize her because I had been told I was an ugly, unattractive, miserable creature no boy would love and I believed the image the fucked-up mirror reflected.

Did I look ugly to you, Dad?  Or did I threaten you?  Did I look ugly to you, Mom?  Or did you also believe what Dad saw?

Anyway, it’s too late.  I lost my chance to live the life of a pretty girl.

Then I became a plain looking highschool girl.

When I remember my highschool years, I am cast as that unpopular girl with long hair hiding half of her face, Violet Parr in The Incredibles, believing that she is invisible.  My best friend is that popular girl who dates the football team captain.

I started having drinking problem while I was in highschool.

A couple of years ago, I had an opportunity to attend a highschool reunion.  One guy, who was neither the football team captain, nor an academic high achiever, told me that I had been his crush in highschool.  I was like, WTF.  “You were a beautiful and intelligent girl,” he said, “and I admired you.”  Shit, I didn’t know.  I knew he liked me, but I did’t believe anybody would like me.

So I lost my chance to live a life of popular girl in highschool.

When we are surrounded with distorted mirrors, we believe the distorted images they reflect.  I wonder what it would be like to have a mirror on the wall that always tells me I am the most beautiful girl in the world.  I guess that would also fuck me up in a different way.

I still can’t believe 100%, but I think I am freaking gorgeous as an old gal of certain age.  It took me almost half a century to feel unugly.

“You are a catch,” a male friend of mine recently informed me.   “Really?” I said.  “Yes, you really are a catch.”  I believed him.

Postcard

Posted on by SomatiCat

I found an old postcard.  I was clearing out “stuff” in an attic.

My father passed just a week ago after slowly disintegrating from Alzheimer’s for the last 10 years.  I heard the news and flew home for his funeral.

The last time I saw him, about 9 months ago, he didn’t recognize me.  He haven’t recognized me for a long time.  I spent much more time talking with him once I became a nice stranger to him.  When he knew me, we didn’t talk to each other.   He talked at me.  I talked to myself.  We didn’t communicate.

I didn’t know him.  He didn’t know me.

My mother seemed to be relieved.  “I’ll burn all the photos of him,” she said.  After his funeral, she immediately started to clearing out “stuff.”  She has been clearing out “stuff” since my father moved to a nursing home 4 years ago.  My father hoarded.

I was helping her.  And I found the postcard along with yellowed newspaper clippings.  It was from my parents to my grandmother on their honeymoon.  It was from them before I ever be conceived or maybe on the day I was conceived.

They were somebody I didn’t know.   I smelled happiness from the message on the postcard.  It was an ordinary message.  “We are having a good time.  We bought something for you and sent it by mail…”  What did they buy?  Who chose the postcard?    Why is it here?  The old house my grandmother used to live in was demolished decades ago.  Did my father saved it when my grandmother died?    What happened to this newlywed couple?

I never saw them happy together.  I don’t know them.

I showed my mother the old newspaper clippings I found.  One of them had a group photo of nurses. I recognized my mother among the young nurses.  She said, “That’s me,” and she threw them in a trash bin.

I didn’t show her the postcard and I brought it back to my place with me.

The irony?  I also fond photos I sent to my parents long time ago, while I was married.  I looked young, beautiful and happy with the guy I was married to.   Who is this woman?  I don’t know her either.