Treading Water

So much for the deep thinking. Seems I have come across as whiney and bitter. Not true, but there you go. You think that you have created something that would allow the reader to bring up ways that would be helpful not only to you, but cathartic for the reader, also. Instead, you get told to basically get over it, that if you were any sort of person, you would be able to do something about it. Yeah, as though it's that simple,

Another friend asked me why I was sad. I honestly wasn't when I wrote the previous post, but after the conversations I had, and the good cry during and afterward, I replied to her thusly:

"It's nothing, really. I am tired--so tired of everything. I am also incredibly stupid sometimes, even though I know better. It's too hard to explain this way. I love my job, but I don't want to do it right now. I want to quit and concentrate on the rest of this semester and my last semseter at school. But I can't. I want to find someone--a helpmeet--someone who I can depend on to take some of the pressure of the hard stuff off of me. I am tired of being everything to everybody except what I want to be, without someone there to be everything to me. I have lots of friends, but I am lonely. Meeting new people is hard; those that I would like to be with I am nervous around, and while I can usually pony up and do it, I come across as too much of something--negative, maybe?--when I am not.

"I am pretty sure it's just all the stress from the end of the semester and work.

"I wish I could afford to just run away. I wish I could win the lottery--not because I want a lot of money or be lazy, I just want to have enough to do research if I want, to go out to more than a movie four times a year, to go see things that I have always wanted to see without having other people's responsibilities foisted upon me.

"Like I said--difficult to explain. And I know it's not much compared to what you have been through, but it's like I have lost a part of myself that I don't know how to get back."

I don't want to seem as though I am ungrateful for all my friends. I don't want to appear as though I don't appreciate all the things that others have done for me. But being appreciated is something I would like, too. But again, that's my fault, too--right?

I have made some horrible, terrible mistakes in my life that I have had to overcome. I have lived through things that some people have nightmares about. I have stayed strong through the roughest times that nearly ended my sanity as well as my life and that of my child. Forgive me if I am a little "whiney" or bitter or sad every so often. Forgive me if I want to get away from the things that remind me of what I might possibly never have, or had that I let go. Forgive me if I get tired of looking beyond the facade--when I have to do that every second of the day and no one looks closely enough at me to see beyond mine. Forgive me for not wanting to be the doormat anymore. And forgive me for not knowing how to keep from being one.