Thursday, September 30, 2010

Group texts used to frustrate me...

I'm writing my thoughts in the middle of the day... It's not that I do this very often, but it would seem more typical for me to write very late at night, when I'm exhausted and much more emotionally vulnerable. Is that a sign that these thoughts are long overdue to be released?

I don't even know where to begin. I'm so worried of coming across terribly insecure, even whiny and annoying, as though my only purpose in writing was to seek somebody's pity. I suppose I truly am insecure; timid and frightful and even paralyzed by insecurity. But the last thing I would ever want is somebody responding to this out of pity. It's that thought which almost stops me from writing in the first place. And just by writing this, I'll be suspicious, even cynical, of any changes in behavior of those around me. I'm too skeptical to believe in genuine change, certain instead it's done out of guilt.
And so maybe somebody would start to try, for a brief period, and I'd refuse to respond - cynical and suspicious. And before long, their guilt or pity would subside, and things would return to normal...
(After all, why are you only now trying? Why not before?)


I used to hate group texts. They're frustratingly impersonal, and I also began associating them with dinners where I would show up and be completely overlooked by a dozen people for an hour.
One time, as a "test" of sorts, I responded, telling the sender I would for sure be there. (For conflicting schedules, or simply not wishing to be alone in a crowd, I rarely every came anyway.) I sat and watched from a fair distance as they all met up and left; not waiting for me, nobody trying to check on me to see if I was coming... I had no value to them at all.
Before I came to school, I cooked for these people every week for ten weeks straight. I drove over an hour each way, paying for everything out of my own pocket. Now please don't think I did this to earn anything from them. Giving is just how I live. But to be disregarded, left feeling worthless to them and unappreciated; I just couldn't keep trying after having given so much of myself away and having no more value to them than the day before we met.

And then unfolds a year and a half of story, too much to explain now, but which has shaped me more than any of the repeating relational wrecks that make up my life combined. (And I mean relational in a broader sense; not specifically that of dating relationships.) There's no way to describe just how impossibly never-will-be-good-enough this left me feeling. There's so much more, but I just don't want to get into that.


So here I am in current time. All I want is to feel like a valuable part in a group; not taken for granted, nor taken advantage of. I don't want people to want me around because I take good pictures, or because I cook for them, or because of anything else I do. I want people to want me around, just because they like me. I can't remember feeling that since marching band in high school. That was four years ago, and it's been two years since having anything I could even label as "group".
And now I miss those group texts...



My birthday sucked this year. I went to class, I shot some photos for a theater thing, and then sat around my house by myself. Brian made me brownie-cookies around 10 or 11 that night. Do you have any idea how totally miserable it was, to go my entire birthday, and know hundreds of people here at school, and literally the only person who did ANYTHING for me was one of the three guys living with me? I will say, a pan of brownies has never meant more to me than those, but that day sucked. I've had a lot of bad days, but going almost entirely unacknowledged on my birthday really wrecks it all. And that's something nobody can take back...