Becoming

I look back upon the person I was at twenty-five or so, and I have little patience for her. I don't like that Diane very much, and respect isn't easy to generate. Still, this is the person from which I am forged, so I do try not to forget myself. I *can* appreciate my memories, but myself gets little credit from me-now. The good fortune of memory is that it, like the presence, is all experienced first person, so it's all a narrative with eyes turned outward.

When Beloved Ex and I were married, I spent too much of my self will and self worth investing in how he reflected on me, how I felt I was treated, how each eventuality turned out for me. It seems from the standpoint of today as if I had no thought for his experience of life - and, though I'm sure that can't be accurate, there's little question I came *first* for myself. Life was so uncertain I placed above anything my experience of it, and so, though I cared about my husband, I was unable to synthesize "him" and "me" into a proper "us" - and us suffered, as a result.

He had an instinct for blended priority emotionally - better than I did - but even with that, he and I never built goals together, and so I never came into his fold, never adopted his concerns for myself, never got past "if he becomes a big rock star, *I'll* be all rich and hot and famous."

It's a strange thing, the almost sociopathic lack of empathy of a vain and spoiled twenty-something - especially considering I started life as a terrifyingly tender child so utterly absorbed in the experience of others that I even built a world of understanding around 'what it must be like' to live in bodies other than my own. It was a function of natural curiosity - but my natural curiosity, when I was little, was focused acutely on other creatures' lives. Other people, the animals I knew - strangers and the everpresent alike. I would still my own being, and build in my mind, sensation by imaginary sensation, the body of someone I knew, or that of my pet ... and attempt to experience someone or something else in the literal way we are capable of when we are young, curious, and creative. I could bend my brain and mould my legs so that I had no arms, and moved - fast - on all fours like our spaniel. I could elevate and weight, and know what it was to be "big" - to be a grownup. To be a woman, to be a boy, to be a man. Anatomy had little interest in itself, other than as the means to explicate for me what it must be like ...

What it must be like to be as tall as my father.

What it must be like to be as feminine as my mother.

What it must be like to have a flat tongue, hanging out over sharp teeth that never bit anything, like our dear old Patches.

What - even - it must be like to be small.

I was fascinated by my own physical growth. Looking at the clothing I was told I had worn as an infant absorbed and enchanted me. "I was once ... *this* small ..." My little patent leather shoes delighted me. I would try to fit in the toy baby bed for my dolls, any encounter with toy-sized real things, like furniture, captivated my imagination. We had my father's childhood rolltop desk. We had a little rocking chair in child scale. My first umbrella - just my size! - was the most amazing piece of equipment in the world - because it was *mine*, and because it was an adult manifestation come to live in my child's experience.


Where I lost the interest in others which led to my loss of ability to exit my own concerns, I have never stopped to think before. It came as I came out of myself - left the hermetic world of a shy little girl, and broke the bubble that contained her little obsessions. It came when I felt I finally had something to "do" - something to think about - other than the boredom-born fancies of my mute and skull-bound brain.

By the time I met Beloved Ex, I was already much the brash and overcompensating person people know me as even still. "Intense" I have so often been told. Overwhelming, I know many people find me. Too much, too loud, too confident, too willing to speak. Too able to, more than likely. I went through a long period of not knowing how to cope with the fact that even some of those closest to me thought me a firebrand, a trial of the nerves, an aggressive monster. From inside, my life seems so peaceful. From inside it, my mind doesn't seem so strange.

It's getting out from the inside that took me the longest time. And, I realize ... in the years I have worked to do this, it seems to me I do hear less about what a clumsy brute I seem to others. In the years I have abdicated my own paramount importance to myself - in form, at least, if not in honest essence.


***


An interesting thing about putting myself aside - about making room for the interests of others - is that I have not suffered as that interim, strange, and selfish Diane would have expected.

She feared to have any reward shared. She feared not to be the center. She wanted to be The Best - the most - the world-ender - the superlative. To be less seemed wounding, seemed terrifying.

She. I.

*I* could not take the uncertainty of being lost - of being part of the world with everyone. How does a young woman become herself but to break away from homogeneity? How but to be on top of everyone else? And how could I be on top but by self interest?

And what an exhausting master selfishness like that can be. Forever on guard against slights and suffering. Forever sure if I weren't greedy, I would never gain. Sure if I weren't grasping - of those I loved, most of all - I would lose. I was hugely acquisitive of admiration, and hardly paid it back in kind. I was a social butterfly, but always had to be The Pretty One. I was so sure being anything meant forgetting about everything else ... eventually, I became blind.


I knew it was happening, to be fair. I sensed a need for growth. And resented it. I did no favors to my marriage, frantic that IT might be stifling me. I did no favors to myself, proving showily and broadly how important I was to myself. The fear shifted from surface things and fell off a cliff inside me, and landed in a deep and unexplored place, and there I found that I was still waiting.

There I found that there was somewhere to go.

Demolition done ... I came back to my hometown, and decided that I Was Growing.

I didn't really know how to do it, and I didn't exactly pour on the coal, as dad used to say of putting in an effort. But I decided.

What experiences actually made it *happen* ... I don't know. I can't give myself credit of will; but those who love me set me good examples. From TEO I learned how to fake like I was listening ... and I rediscovered an old habit, of Being There for people, which has always been part of me. I concentrated on the form of sincerity, alchemized its appearance at last, and in the end some osmosis happened and, having surrounded myself with the blessing of sincere and open and generous people, they had their effect on me ... and to some degree at least, self-interest began to find companionship with the endless fascination that is: other people.

I'm no spiritual master, but I DO find it enormously pleasurable to distract myself by concerning myself with other people, and also more and more important. Surrounded by people with actual priorities, difficulties, goals, and heartbeats, I realize how little I have to fear, how comfortable my life, how living on loss unrealized is wasteful, how profligate it is to fret about milk being in a glass bottle which might just break ... when life has plenty of mishaps to offer without making them up.

Chief above all, rather than growing, I may have learned conservation. Conservation of judgment - but mostly conservation of energy. The energy to spend on fear, the energy to spend on agita, the energy to spend on resentments unspoken - and the energy on speaking them. I've learned how to hear how much of my concern, at a certain age, was all just drama and noise.

I'm no less dramatic - but I am, I hope, far less the to-the-cheap-seats emoter, over-selling every aspect of my life, myself. Convincing myself that thereby is gained worthwhile prominence.

Flailing.



Interesting, how not being a flailing shrieker actually gives people the impression that you might even be a balanced and reasonable person.

And also makes it so much more fun to flail and shriek over inconsequential joys and the actual yummyness of life.