Foundations

I have taken recently to sending long, arduous emails to friends and family - tirades about my life and its joys and frustrations written in sometimes non-comprehensible stream of consciousness. After my third victim replied to these self-indulgent rants with a curt message showing no indication that they had read the email at all, I decided I needed an outlet. A place where having to listen to me go on and on about myself was an optional, and perhaps a bit more objective, activity. It is for this reason I find myself writing a blog.

I suppose I should give background, everything makes more sense in a context. It is difficult to know what things about yourself are relevant to not only you, but to the rest of the world. Perhaps one might learn more about me through what I choose to reveal than the revelation itself.

I was born to teenage parents, the oldest child of an oldest child. They divorced two years later, but not before giving me a sister who would from the very earliest of days prove to be my opposite, and at times my nemesis. When I was five someone told me I was beautiful and when I was nine someone told me I was a genius. When I was thirteen I realised that I was neither of these things - an epiphany from which I have never fully recovered. My life was dominated by the pursuit of awards and rewards. I made friends with popular people but was never popular. I joined every group, played every sport and filled my college applications with a laundry list of achievements. My best friend was a boy and to this day I still think he may be the only person who has ever understood me. In spite of my powerful position as the oldest, I was consistently the family freak. I thought, spoke and dressed differently, I aspired to different things, had different interests. I was the butt of many family jokes and was referred to consistently as a 'drama queen.' I required the company of others constantly, but felt lost and lonely amongst them. When I was 16 my half brother was born and I watched him come into the world. I welcomed the chance to play the role of 'big sister,' a role my other sibling regularly denied me of. My family faced tragedy, but then so does every family. There was illness, emotional breakdowns, suicide attempts, and custody changes. It seems distant and almost unimportant now, yet those events shaped behaviours which I have spent my whole life trying to shake.

I left home and moved to the big city when I was 18. City life suited me better than I could have imagined, and I felt like myself for the first time in my life. My freshman year in college I wept daily at the injustice of the world. By sophomore year I had become a cynical activist, feeling compelled to take action but all too aware of its irrelevance. I dropped out of uni and became a waitress, falling briefly into what can only be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy (and family legacy) of drinking, smoking and working too much. This brief stage of my life was my most disastrous, yet least frightening. I met my husband, and he began to save me from myself. I moved abroad, where I fought tirelessly to hold on to an American identity about which I had previously been ashamed. When I was 23 I lost my grandmother. It was then that I realised the gravity of living away from home and it was the first and only time I have resented my partner. I have moved to suburbia and crept into the 'middle class' - facts of which I am simultaneously proud and ashamed. I own a home and have a dog, I attend family dinners and write Christmas cards. I am infinitely grateful for the gifts in my life, but it is at times overshadowed by feelings of suffocation and anxiety.

Each day my husband teaches me more life lessons - how to be patient, how to be kind, how to let go of anger. He is blissfully unaware of his role as my Zen guru, and I am a reluctant (and often poor) student. Like those people in my childhood, my husband tells me that I am beautiful and that I am a genius. This time I know better than to believe him. I still long to spend time with the social outcasts, I still bore everyone with lists of social injustices, I still feel completely uncomfortable in my own skin. I live each day with the legacy of other people's expectations, and I fear more and more that the path I have chosen for myself is built more on a foundation of what my parents were not than on what I am.