The Only Person Who Reads These Is Me

And that is fine.

Trying to get through a bout of low-level depression.

This loneliness is a lake I'm floating in, mostly underwater.

Two Ziploc Bags of Pancake Batter

I'm trying to avoid doing work at all costs. So, here I am--writing where no one will see.

I don't know if it's because I've been teaching M. Butterfly for the past week, but the idea of relational performativity has been on my mind constantly. I keep wondering: Is everything we do a performance? Is there any act--I'll just say of mine, but I'm applying this to the world at large--in which I behave that is purely my own? Or do I always anticipate, or crave, an audience? How am I manipulating my thoughts, my memory, my words? Is my entire existence just a string of scenarios in which I am I censoring parts of me, or exaggerating others?

I guess some of it boils down to trust. Trust implies interaction with another person, and an assumption that the person possesses an essence of sincerity or authenticity. But what if they don't? What if every act is exactly that--an act? So many speech acts are ultimately futile. From the people in meetings who love to hear their own voices, but rarely achieve any meritorious labor, to the men who pantomime vulnerability in order to fulfill their get-laid-quick schemes--what is the point? 

What am I not understanding about the world and my place in it? I spent my entire life working myself numb, so that I could achieve the love, the recognition, and the comfort I so desperately wanted. I did whatever I could to make myself (what I believed would be most) lovable in the eyes of someone--anyone--I desired, and it almost killed me. Now, I have all the things that I thought would make me lovable to someone--things that would earn me a person who would want me and understand me. And now, I'm more isolated than ever. I have the job, the home, the physical beauty, the capacity to love myself and someone else. Those took me literally decades to achieve. But now, also, it's like I've stepped into my own life's camera obscura--where everything has been flipped upside-down and inverted. Having achieved the goals has only placed me in a more rarefied stratosphere, near which very few of the type of people who I want would ever venture to go. And the people who are here? They don't understand me. 

The ones who might be able to understand me now think I'm just some privileged priss who's always had it this good, so they approach me suspiciously. And the more I try to tell them that I've spent 90% of my life in the same place they are, the more I just come off as a panderer. They stop listening to me. I'm two-dimensional to everyone, but for different reasons. I'm either the strange, white trash chick who managed to roll under the closing garage door into the fancy party just seconds before being crushed to death, or I'm the chick who can afford to pay for an overpriced lunch, so I must have no clue what it means to struggle. I don't have a solid place in this world. 

To be honest, I have no clue how to navigate it. The full-time teaching job I have now pays five times what my first full-time teaching job did just six years ago. I don't know how that happened. I just kept working my ass off; one day I woke up and was financially secure. I went from scrambling for low-income housing, living out of my car, engaging in survival sex, and sleeping on piss-stained futons--to this. And the opposite of my endgame happened. Instead of finally being accepted as a result of my hard-earned achievements, I'm more outside of anyplace to call a community than ever before. Look, I know there are far worse problems to live with. I just feel lost, and pretty lonely sometimes. Oh well. Whatever.