Circle

Today's, "Hey, you thought you were living your life as a successful adult well hey remember this?" crippling moment of self-reflection came about because of Stay Together for the Kids coming on the radio.

I dislike talking about my parents and my past, because it can sometimes feel like I'm pointing to one specific moment and saying, "see? This is why I have problems. This specific moment in time." I want to be clear that's not the case. It's more a shit pile of stuff that's sort of always teetering around me. I've got a pretty good fence built up around it, and have slowly started shoveling out the shit until maybe I could make something useful out of the plot within the fence. But as I'm working, every now and then, something will come tumbling off the pile and fall at my feet and completely ruin my ability to think in a functional manner. This can happen when I'm not even in a bad mood to begin with.

That's what happened today. I was on my way to work after having a completely fantastic time with a fuck-friend of mine. This song came on the radio, and I spent the next 20 minutes inside my own head trying to get myself back together.

The story behind it: the time I went with my mother for freshman orientation stuff at the University I was going to attend. Things had fallen apart pretty hard the year before - a whole lot of things had come to a head and had wound up with me getting pulled down a flight of stairs and then limping halfway to work after getting the awesome bombshell drop that something I thought was shitty was entire levels of shitty I hadn't even considered. We never talked about any of it, and things just kept spiraling. I was getting out, and this was maybe one of the last times I'd ever be alone with my mother again. I played this song specifically during the road trip. I prefaced it with something like, "this song makes me think about home." In my head, I thought, "everything sucks and I wish I didn't have to run away from it as the only way for it to get better. Talk to me."

Absolutely. Nothing. She mentioned something about how fast I was driving the car, and I took the CD out and put something else in.

So today this song came on the radio and I thought about that road trip. And I thought about what it felt like to be so completely shut down when I was trying to express something emotionally. And then I thought about how people around me now will ask me if I want to talk about what's bothering me, and how it makes me so angry that I can't. How it's all completely internal; the idea that I somehow shouldn't have a problem, because nobody wants to hear about it anyway.