Absorbing Myself

"Am I really self-absorbed?"

I ask, on a post in a blog dedicated to whatever pops into my head.

A kinder variation is "you have a rich inner life." And it is much kinder. I don't hate being told that. I live in my brain, and it's like Barbara Eden's bottle in I Dream of Jeannie - all velvet and cushions - except that it's more like a badly curated Museum of Curiosities. With lots of colors, and velvet, and throw pillows with gold tassels. And monsters.

How did I become the insecure one, obsessed with what everybody thinks of her?

Because if I am lonely, it must be my fault. "Go make friends!" as if it were that easy to find someone to talk to who doesn't say such asinine things as "go make friends" and "you're self-absorbed" or "you're no different than anybody else" or "you just make excuses for everything!"

You can judge. The following is what is in my head tonight:

Tomorrow is Sunday, and I'm not strong enough to deal with it. There will be too many people at church, and I'm ugly. I wish I could find a boyfriend. Or a guy friend. Or somebody to go walking with. Shelley will probably be there, back from Ireland. I want to know everything. I'm deeply sad I don't have an official excuse to crash her apartment. *nearly cries here* I'll have to make sure I have an appointment with Vicki. And the other one. . . L--- something? That's on Tuesday. Can't forget. Will probably forget. Will probably also forget to return Sheri's Georgette Heyer which Anne mustn't ever know about, but I needed that. I might want to avoid Sheri, too. She's so caring, but so divided. Rightly. Jennifer would be a really great girlfriend for [insert secret 'ship here]. Villette is disturbing. I keep identifying with Lucy, but the first-person narration just makes it harder for me to figure out how the book would fit into my dissertation on the relationship between authors and their characters. Twitter today quoted somebody disavowing all responsibility for them, like God disavowing all responsibility for the cruelty of other humans. Authors are very godlike, and yet that seems like such an artificial construction. There's a tricky difference between constructing something for a specific trajectory, and controlling your characters, and what does that say about God? I mean, the obvious go-to example is Hitler. God made him with all his weaknesses, didn't he? But not the circumstances in which his deficiencies were allowed to have wreak their full destruction. Necessarily. He made the world. In seven. . . Garth Nix is obsessed with sevens, but sometimes it's colors, sometimes it's days, and sometimes it's necromantic bells. I want to be a writer, though possibly not one easily pegged as obsessed with something. Like myself. She said I was self-absorbed. Is it true? Of course it's true. What else do you have to think about? You are six months away from seeing ghostly nuns. Exams are coming. You're not ready. You only vaguely remember half of your texts, and barely anything of the remainder. I don't want to disappoint my committee. Any more. I'm pretty sure Matt thinks I'm a moron, Anne tried hard but is finally convinced that I'm twelve, Vince thinks HE's superfluous, Jessica scares the [insert anything here] out of me with pure spite and a bit of gossip, and I don't even know what Nadja is supposed to know. How am I going to be ready? My committee are all gone this semester. I know students who meet every week with the department chair. I see a professor once a month, and it's never the one I really need, and it's never the information I'm looking for. I just need some kind of orientation - some information about where I am, and where to go. I'm so lost, wandering through these books. And [expletive deleted] OneNote won't work. I was supposed to get married this year: now instead it's going to be my beautiful little sister, twelve years younger than I am. I really hope her boyfriend (yet?) has shaved his facial mistake. Seriously. He needs to choose between the girl or the 'stache. People are so painful. Everything about them is so painful. Every time I see another pair of eyes, it's a pair of eyes that could suddenly focus on me, and I will lose my soul. I am so tired of living in a place where everyone thinks I am just like them, and the more they say it, the clearer it becomes that it is not true, simply because I would NEVER say something like that. I would never think it. People are not the same. And because every time they say it, it's violently invalidating. They're saying "you feel wrong," and that is alienating, as if I am expected to respond "oh. Then I'll just feel what you feel instead." As if that were possible. I promise that when somebody tells me how they are feeling, I will immediately and always simply believe them, and hug them, and find out more. I know how it hurts to be told that I am living my life wrong. I will learn from that. My AZ friends are pretty chill tonight. I worried about Andrea's grading, but she seems better today. Becky's back with all the awesome, being Christlike and probably glowing. She has a good glow when she's content in herself. I want to talk to her about how sad I am, but it can wait. Don't want to smudge the glow. She did good. I listened to an inarticulate spoiler/review of a romantic movie I'll never see, and I got about two words in about the book I've been reading all day. Maybe it didn't make me cry, but how can she call ME self-absorbed? And I shrug, and believe her. And I think about it like this, and after a while it turns into hate. It hurts, and because she would never understand why it hurts, admit that she had done wrong, or do anything but accuse me of doing the same thing in a kind of tu quoque defensiveness, I can't ever tell her, and so I start to hate. Because I curl up in pain, instead of letting the Savior clean the wound for me. Because it might sting. Well, nice to figure that out. I should be reading. I hope Villette finds love: I'll be able to live in fiction.