My mother always told me I'm a late bloomer. Those who are familiar with the term may have had it described to them beneath a similar sweet sugar coating: perennials are the strong ones, they shine bright while the rest of the garden begins to sink. Since I can remember, my world has been filled with lovely analogies to illuminate all the inconveniences of my defects. Perhaps I'm ungrateful, but I just can't justify celebrating my own Tickseed-hood when fragrant Roses are hanging, in full bloom, off their metaphorical vines of sophistication.
No, let's call it what it is; I'm slow, very, very slow. While my friends were all involving themselves in high school events and festivities, I stayed frozen in the same thinking I had held since the age of four; life was a movie and I was the star. And since the fads of my generation centered around the three 'J's', Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimmy Hendrix, I didn't stand much of a chance at playing a 'healthy role' in the little false masquerade I was starring. The consequences of my own delusions, unfortunately, left me friendless, cashed out, and far too terrified to engage in a good old fashioned heroin overdose like the rest of my heroes from the 60's seemed to have done.
Consequently, after a total of three hospitalizations due to what was diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality, by the time I hit my twenties, instead of having fun like everyone else was doing, I was picking up the pieces of my adolescence. As I began to realize the "role" I had been playing wasn't working too well for me, I chose a completely different one that involved fantasies of me telling my life story and talking about how far I've come in a large room in front of my mom, step dad and all the other AA and Al-Anon members I had spent my life growing up around. I deemed myself to be a recovered alcoholic. And that's where I spent eight more awkward and ill-suited years of my life.
So, here I am, thirty-two years old and while the rest of the women my age are having children or focusing on their careers, I'm broke, unemployed and out almost every night. Faced with a sense of ambivalence that is completely unfamiliar to me, I have become less and less concerned with my own future and more concerned with where my next adventure lies. Last night Hunter asked me what drives me and all I could think was, 'where I will get the money to pay my next bill.' I am officially twenty-two again, but not at all the way I did twenty-two ten years ago. There is no skittish planning and excessive caution. Is is bad that I'm enjoying it as much as I am?
Sadly, the voices of AA and my mother still ring strongly in my ears. "You're regressing. . .You're going down a dangerous path." "This is what happens, you're becoming numb, it's a progressive disease." "Normal people don't think like this." I find myself wondering if I would still feel guilty and ashamed had I not; one, grown up in a culture that perpetuates this belief that we're just all supposed to know what we want and where we're going by the age of thirty or there is something inherently wrong with us; and, two, spent an entire decade of my own life being told that the kind of behavior I've been partaking in is part of a disease that will one day kill me. Although I'm in no way unhappy, I can't help but feel like I'm supposed to be.
I will admit, I am discouraged. Lately it feels as if the rug just keeps on getting pulled out from under me. I spent so much time planning out my future and believing I was taking the proper steps to inheriting whatever pretty little life package was supposed to come my way, yet, life package still has not arrived and I have no more idea what my place is in the world then I did ten years ago. So what the hell was the point then? When I was a gymnast I would get rips in my palms all the time from the bars and my coaches would come over, tell us to close our eyes and they would tear the thick layer of flappy skin off of us so fast we hardly knew it happened. This terrified me, no matter how much evidence pointed to that method as the superior route. I tried to pull it off on my own, thinking I would somehow spare myself the pain by doing it slowly, but it never ended well, it hurt twice as much and I usually wound up bleeding. I made a decision last year to stop trying to slowly pull the skin off; to not let fear and caution rule my life. Since then I went down to being a part-time waitress, I committed to being a full time writer, I traveled to Thailand by myself, and I relinquished the eight years I spent sober and hoping to prove to my mom I was capable of making healthy decision; that I'm not crazy; that I am grounded; that I'm not going down a dark path. I made the decision last year, that I was going to live for me. There have been consequences and benefits from this decision and I'm just hoping it will all balance out eventually. Or not. I know today that I'm not starring in a movie and that my life is not determined by my mother's concerns. I'm just a tiny little organism that knows very little about very little and strangely after so many years of inflating myself and the circumstances around me, my smallness and my insignificance has never been so comforting.
