the soul grows heavy
Sunday, September 8th, 2019 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amovingtargetTL;DR: I am alive, and more or less okay. I'm going to try and work on posting more often.
So, I turned 30 last week. Something that I had been looking forward to it for the last five years or so somehow. Not sure why I felt that way, looking back… Maybe I thought a switch would flip and… I'd suddenly be different, that my life would be different, that my family would listen to me or take me seriously or ask me questions like Do you want kids? Do you want to move out? You're an adult and we understand if you want these things and we will help you do them. I didn't think I was that kind of naive, but here we are...
Then I hit some kind of trigger in March -- a cousin's insta post about #3before30, having three kids already -- and have been sad about turning 30 ever since. Everybody on instagram -- certainly all my cousins, and all my school best friends that are there -- is having families, or travelling, or hanging out with friends. Moving out, moving on. All things I haven't accomplished. I feel like I don't have the luxury of making choices about my life, the clock is just going to run out on me. It just hit me all of a sudden, that I'm just going to be the odd one out forever -- never had kids, never married or had a relationship, never left home and went to uni, never travelled with friends, never had a full time job. Never, never, never...
I’ve spent much of the time since then not wanting to be alive to see my birthday. Not that I could -- or will -- ever bring myself to do something about that. On my worst days, not being able to kill myself is just another kind of failure, and even on the best ones the idea of living all those years is just so much weight that it's enough to break me in half when I least expect it.
When it came down to it, my birthday itself was nice. I woke up feeling good, the sun was shining, my bath was the perfect temperature and I had a wonderful thing from Lush to go with it -- that was from my little brother and sister in law taking me to the city and treating me to various things -- along with a gift fromenemyofperfect that I spent those morning hours reading -- a fic about me being happy and loved and seeing the world, like I'd wanted to do years ago. It left me with a little bubble that I floated on for half the day, at least. A feeling of lightness that came back to me now and then over the next day or two.
But by late afternoon, I was feeling spoiled and misunderstood at the same time. I don't (usually, consciously) doubt that my family love me, but I've never been convinced that they understand me at all. I got a lot of gifts, and some of them were especially thoughtful and I loved them, but at the end of the day it was also a lot of stuff that I don't actually need. Nobody asked me what I wanted or needed, except my brother who asked if there were any games that I wanted and hadn't got around to buying. There was that foolish, naive hope again. Here are some huge sums of money so you can get a mortgage and go off and be your own person without us involving ourselves in your choices. You deserve this.
Since then... I've just been my sad old self again. I've been trying to make some plans for the next few years to snuffle myself towards with mixed results. I'm the kind of person that likes and needs lists and organisation and I still struggle with it at the best of times. I've had to babysit three days this week -- one of them unplanned, and it didn't help me feel like I was, or could be, anything other than resident yesman.
It’s hard to feel good or even hopeful about my future… but I'm trying.
So, I turned 30 last week. Something that I had been looking forward to it for the last five years or so somehow. Not sure why I felt that way, looking back… Maybe I thought a switch would flip and… I'd suddenly be different, that my life would be different, that my family would listen to me or take me seriously or ask me questions like Do you want kids? Do you want to move out? You're an adult and we understand if you want these things and we will help you do them. I didn't think I was that kind of naive, but here we are...
Then I hit some kind of trigger in March -- a cousin's insta post about #3before30, having three kids already -- and have been sad about turning 30 ever since. Everybody on instagram -- certainly all my cousins, and all my school best friends that are there -- is having families, or travelling, or hanging out with friends. Moving out, moving on. All things I haven't accomplished. I feel like I don't have the luxury of making choices about my life, the clock is just going to run out on me. It just hit me all of a sudden, that I'm just going to be the odd one out forever -- never had kids, never married or had a relationship, never left home and went to uni, never travelled with friends, never had a full time job. Never, never, never...
I’ve spent much of the time since then not wanting to be alive to see my birthday. Not that I could -- or will -- ever bring myself to do something about that. On my worst days, not being able to kill myself is just another kind of failure, and even on the best ones the idea of living all those years is just so much weight that it's enough to break me in half when I least expect it.
When it came down to it, my birthday itself was nice. I woke up feeling good, the sun was shining, my bath was the perfect temperature and I had a wonderful thing from Lush to go with it -- that was from my little brother and sister in law taking me to the city and treating me to various things -- along with a gift from
enemyofperfect that I spent those morning hours reading -- a fic about me being happy and loved and seeing the world, like I'd wanted to do years ago. It left me with a little bubble that I floated on for half the day, at least. A feeling of lightness that came back to me now and then over the next day or two.But by late afternoon, I was feeling spoiled and misunderstood at the same time. I don't (usually, consciously) doubt that my family love me, but I've never been convinced that they understand me at all. I got a lot of gifts, and some of them were especially thoughtful and I loved them, but at the end of the day it was also a lot of stuff that I don't actually need. Nobody asked me what I wanted or needed, except my brother who asked if there were any games that I wanted and hadn't got around to buying. There was that foolish, naive hope again. Here are some huge sums of money so you can get a mortgage and go off and be your own person without us involving ourselves in your choices. You deserve this.
Since then... I've just been my sad old self again. I've been trying to make some plans for the next few years to snuffle myself towards with mixed results. I'm the kind of person that likes and needs lists and organisation and I still struggle with it at the best of times. I've had to babysit three days this week -- one of them unplanned, and it didn't help me feel like I was, or could be, anything other than resident yesman.
It’s hard to feel good or even hopeful about my future… but I'm trying.