Never What You Think It Is

For about 18 months during half of my 7th and all of my 8th grade, I lived and went to school in NYC. It was the best year and a half of school. I was challenged with great classes like Latin and Medieval History. I had friends or at least people who meant something to me. Living with my grandmother and Aunt Marie, I wasn't surrounded by chaos and fights and alcohol and cruelty at home, only to have to play it off with my approximation of normalcy at school.

Those 18 months meant a lot to me.

I went back for this school's reunion this past weekend. Fairly few remembered me. Or if they did remember me, remembered that they didn't like me or really a less self-pitying point of view, remembered that I didn't matter to them in the same way they mattered to me.

That was hard. Harder still to ignore which I have been mightily trying to do for the past 48 hours. I'm good at denial and ignoring but I'm not having much success right now. I've cried during this time...not real tears because that would mean showing how I feel. I'm crying on the proverbial inside.

This is a constant in my life.

During the after party of her fifth grade classmates that they were kind enough to invite me, the unremembered one, I embarrassed my sister by being loud, demanding and obnoxious. Not of her but of the people around her. I apologized to her, but she didn't ask me why. She said "No worries," but didn't ask me why. If she had I would have told her that I was tired of people taking advantage of her. Long story, but she has been organizing and taking charge groups of uncooperative, privileged people and I saw that happening at this get together of her classmates. I spoke up loudly which I probably would not have done if I hadn't had that second half beer. **sigh** This is why I don't drink - it's cute when you're young and obnoxious when you're old. I'm old.

It wasn't because of whatever reason people who don't know me think. I suspect my sister has a reason why I was all obnoxious also. She, of course, has a bit more insight but I don't know. I don't know because she didn't ask and I didn't volunteer the info.

Nobody asks.

Nobody asks how the hysterectomy has affected me.

Nobody asks how afraid I am of dying alone.

Nobody asks how sitting next to an unaware bigot brings my life down.

Nobody asks how never being able to be excellent in my job depresses me.

Nobody asks how my self-loathing affects me.

Nobody asks why it's there.

Nobody asks why I don't cry.

I now have to take my uterusless self to a job I'm failing at while listening to the mildly bigoted ditz drone on next to me while I do the bidding of grown lawyers who think of me as the same ilk as a xerox machine.

Though I've ignored this space into internet oblivion, still too many people know this blog is here, so this is about all the pathetic blues crying that's barely appropriate.