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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#31: "I Missed Out."
As you may have guessed, I have some years of experience in my life at this point, and I have been at many of those responsibilities of adulthood for a significant time. My younger years were not full of the things that I would have considered a standard part of the experience of childhood, adolescence, and the young adult experience, and as time goes along, I find myself having to fight the perception that the opportunity to experience most of the "standard" experiences has already passed me by and there will be no more chances to do those things.
The concept that's most relevant, even though it is also a cruel concept, is the Japanese colloquialism "Christmas cake." The idea behind that is a pressure for young women to get married or otherwise have their lives arranged and settled by the time they turn 25 (since Christmas is December 25), because nobody wants Christmas cake after Christmas. The implications are not particularly flattering to anyone. It's nice there's a niche for U.S. culture that acknowledges reinvention in later years is acceptable, (and, to some degree, expected, since there's the concept of the "mid-life crisis," where someone goes through the feelings of worry that youth has fled them and then either tries to recapture that feeling of youth or despairs at joining the ranks of the old, or both) as well as the concept that an older woman is more sexually desirable because of the experience she has at knowing what she wants and how to make the experience pleasurable for herself and for her partner.
When it comes to the feeling of having missed out, though, I'm usually thinking about experiences that didn't happen during my university days and the time afterward when I was in the terrible relationship. In theory, I was supposed to have found and maintained some kind of sweetheart or dating relationship in my university days, regardless of whether that relationship continued past those university days, because, of course, people move and grow farther apart after school no longer holds them together. I waited until graduate school to have a regular relationship with someone, and it was mostly long distance, and I was not the best partner in it, and eventually I drove her into the hands of her eventual husband because it was not a relationship that I wanted to continue in the degrees of intimacy that were becoming apparent.(So, no, I am not a good person, my weasels tell me, because they remind me that I've been the person who has been wanting to leave or keep relationships at less deeply intimate levels.) And then after university was the bad relationship, and it was the first relationship out of university, so often times I feel like that particular span of my life could have been better spent having better relationships with other people, once it had become clear to both of us that things were not going to work out. That I could have potentially spared myself the experiences that I had and spent that time more productively. It would have altered my timeline significantly, to the point where things would be radically different than they are now.
That amount of time there could have also been used to make friends in a more physical proximity manner, but my terrible ex was very happy to have her friends be my friends and for me not to have friends outside of her friends, since she didn't like the prospect of me being somewhere with friends of my own. They might have a negative opinion of her, and they might tell me about their negative opinions and I might believe them. (Which would have happened, most likely, had I been able to maintain those friendships more effectively, instead of having them fall away. Had I been able to assert that I needed time for myself and to see my friends, too. And if they didn't like her and didn't want her along, that she should see that as a spur for self-improvement rather than as a sign that my friends were going to be toxic influences on me. I developed my online friendships more than my proximal ones during that time.
Additionally, I'm really unhappy with the timing on SARS-CoV-2, because, godsdamnit, I was just getting back to feeling stable enough to start wanting to make more casual friendships and go out and do things and then there's a virus that thrives and spreads when people are together, and because we haven't actually done the necessary work toward making our indoor spaces safer and making it so that workplaces and congregating spaces don't become spreader events, it's locked away a lot of things I could be doing to make more friends and develop a group of local people to do activities with. Because I want to make as sure as possible that I'm not going to be a transmission vector for the disease to people who are already fighting off things and who would be strongly affected if I were the person that brings the virus home. Yes, there are the vaccinations, but those are meant to keep people from dying more than they are to provide any sterilizing immunity, at least at this point. So there's a big feeling of missing out on a lot of things because they're not currently safe. When there are vaccinations that can confer real immunity, I will be very happy for them. But at this moment, I'm still feeling like I'm missing out on opportunities because I'm weighing the risks not just to myself, but to my household, and concluding that some things just can't be done at this particular moment. (And others can, but they require a significantly higher class of mask.)
On the other hand, having managed to discard my bad relationship and right the ship of my resource management has allowed for many things that I wouldn't have thought possible while I was in that relationship. I have reconnected with various friends that distanced themselves while I was in the bad relationship, because it was her that was the problem, not me. I've made some more friends and kept in touch with them. And at least in that brief window between the end of the bad relationship and the impacts of the pandemic, I was going out and making more friends and being social and taking part in activities. So, I was well on the way to proving that I hadn't actually missed out on anything, that it had been a pause instead of a crash and burn. With as long as things have gone so far in this pause, there's been talking and weighting and discussion about what risks are acceptable, especially in the face of the potential gains, and we've been working through what kinds of activities can be done and what the requirements would be for those activities so they can be enjoyed. It's meant less missing out on things and more being deliberate about the choices of what's going to be enjoyed and when. We even got to see Barbie in the theater this year—because the theater itself was nearly empty for the showing that we went to, and that was an okay risk. (And the movie was funny.) It's taken some time and negotiation, and expressing our feelings and our beliefs, and establishing what the protocols are, but we're to the point where activities are not an automatic no based on their risks and the situation outside.
There are other spots where I feel like there may have been "missing out." Many of them are tied very hard to the American Dream idea that is sold to us as we grow up, where every man and woman are expected to have found their soulmate, gotten married, had their average 2.3 kids, and either gotten or be working toward a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. The whiteness of that dream is pretty apparent on even a cursory analysis, and similarly the relative privilege of generational wealth, good wages, and savings that are not specifically targeted by get-rich-quick schemes or people who want to enrich themselves by deceiving others and stealing their money, that makes it possible to believe such a dream will be achieved. If I hadn't grown up in a household that fit this particular situation, I might not be chasing it quite so much (or I might be chasing it more.) Being older allows me to see where I'm looking at this with emerald-tinted glasses, but because it's still a core measure of stability for me, there's the danger of believing it uncritically always present, and therefore believing I've missed out on the opportunity to achieve it. On my more lucid days, I recognize it for the glamour that it is, and I'm still quite happy with what I have managed to build with others, but there's still some deep cultural conditioning pulling at me, telling me that I'm missing out, that I'm supposed to be continuing the line and passing on all of my excellent genes to a child and raising them properly and well. Even if I look at everything the way it is and laugh at the thought of adding the expenses of one child to it, much less many children. There's still the idea that I have become Christmas cake, and that I have been for a while, and therefore, even though I've still got a significant amount of time before me (fingers crossed!), I can only consider my life a failure, no matter what happens in the future. (Yes, despite having the house, and the advanced degree, and a household of people who I like and who at least tolerate me. And the cat. And friends.)
It's hard not to look back at the time that I spent doing important and productive things, like degrees, careers, and desperately clinging to the hope that things would get better, and not feel like some amount of that time was wasted. I still have sympathy for that past self, the one who was convinced there wasn't anyone interested in them, the one who was trying very hard to make something fundamentally broken work in whatever way they could, the one who thought they had achieved everything they could and there would be no further good things for them. They were doing the best they could, and that this me has more wisdom and has seen the other side of many of their issues and worries is a testament to them as well. We both wish that things had turned out differently, that others had been more direct, that the terrible person should have realized how terrible she was and broken it off rather than entrench herself more. The remedy, though, as keeps getting told to me by others, is to acknowledge the past as a thing that happened and to build on the present. After all, I've already achieved things that those past selves would not have imagined for themselves, and rather than chasing the achievements of the past, I'm trying to make things work in the present and with an idea toward the future, to do the things now that I want to do (and wanted to do in the past), and I'm succeeding in those spaces perfectly fine. And the more that I manage that particular feat, the less I'm going to feel like I missed out on valuable time and more like it was a phase of my life where I wasn't able to do the things that I'm doing now.
Thanks for coming along on December Days this year. Tomorrow starts another calendar year, and as one does, we'll be participating in the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge, since it really helps start the year off well with fannish commentary and people coming back around for a little bit, even if we then drift off for the rest of the year.
#31: "I Missed Out."
As you may have guessed, I have some years of experience in my life at this point, and I have been at many of those responsibilities of adulthood for a significant time. My younger years were not full of the things that I would have considered a standard part of the experience of childhood, adolescence, and the young adult experience, and as time goes along, I find myself having to fight the perception that the opportunity to experience most of the "standard" experiences has already passed me by and there will be no more chances to do those things.
The concept that's most relevant, even though it is also a cruel concept, is the Japanese colloquialism "Christmas cake." The idea behind that is a pressure for young women to get married or otherwise have their lives arranged and settled by the time they turn 25 (since Christmas is December 25), because nobody wants Christmas cake after Christmas. The implications are not particularly flattering to anyone. It's nice there's a niche for U.S. culture that acknowledges reinvention in later years is acceptable, (and, to some degree, expected, since there's the concept of the "mid-life crisis," where someone goes through the feelings of worry that youth has fled them and then either tries to recapture that feeling of youth or despairs at joining the ranks of the old, or both) as well as the concept that an older woman is more sexually desirable because of the experience she has at knowing what she wants and how to make the experience pleasurable for herself and for her partner.
When it comes to the feeling of having missed out, though, I'm usually thinking about experiences that didn't happen during my university days and the time afterward when I was in the terrible relationship. In theory, I was supposed to have found and maintained some kind of sweetheart or dating relationship in my university days, regardless of whether that relationship continued past those university days, because, of course, people move and grow farther apart after school no longer holds them together. I waited until graduate school to have a regular relationship with someone, and it was mostly long distance, and I was not the best partner in it, and eventually I drove her into the hands of her eventual husband because it was not a relationship that I wanted to continue in the degrees of intimacy that were becoming apparent.(So, no, I am not a good person, my weasels tell me, because they remind me that I've been the person who has been wanting to leave or keep relationships at less deeply intimate levels.) And then after university was the bad relationship, and it was the first relationship out of university, so often times I feel like that particular span of my life could have been better spent having better relationships with other people, once it had become clear to both of us that things were not going to work out. That I could have potentially spared myself the experiences that I had and spent that time more productively. It would have altered my timeline significantly, to the point where things would be radically different than they are now.
That amount of time there could have also been used to make friends in a more physical proximity manner, but my terrible ex was very happy to have her friends be my friends and for me not to have friends outside of her friends, since she didn't like the prospect of me being somewhere with friends of my own. They might have a negative opinion of her, and they might tell me about their negative opinions and I might believe them. (Which would have happened, most likely, had I been able to maintain those friendships more effectively, instead of having them fall away. Had I been able to assert that I needed time for myself and to see my friends, too. And if they didn't like her and didn't want her along, that she should see that as a spur for self-improvement rather than as a sign that my friends were going to be toxic influences on me. I developed my online friendships more than my proximal ones during that time.
Additionally, I'm really unhappy with the timing on SARS-CoV-2, because, godsdamnit, I was just getting back to feeling stable enough to start wanting to make more casual friendships and go out and do things and then there's a virus that thrives and spreads when people are together, and because we haven't actually done the necessary work toward making our indoor spaces safer and making it so that workplaces and congregating spaces don't become spreader events, it's locked away a lot of things I could be doing to make more friends and develop a group of local people to do activities with. Because I want to make as sure as possible that I'm not going to be a transmission vector for the disease to people who are already fighting off things and who would be strongly affected if I were the person that brings the virus home. Yes, there are the vaccinations, but those are meant to keep people from dying more than they are to provide any sterilizing immunity, at least at this point. So there's a big feeling of missing out on a lot of things because they're not currently safe. When there are vaccinations that can confer real immunity, I will be very happy for them. But at this moment, I'm still feeling like I'm missing out on opportunities because I'm weighing the risks not just to myself, but to my household, and concluding that some things just can't be done at this particular moment. (And others can, but they require a significantly higher class of mask.)
On the other hand, having managed to discard my bad relationship and right the ship of my resource management has allowed for many things that I wouldn't have thought possible while I was in that relationship. I have reconnected with various friends that distanced themselves while I was in the bad relationship, because it was her that was the problem, not me. I've made some more friends and kept in touch with them. And at least in that brief window between the end of the bad relationship and the impacts of the pandemic, I was going out and making more friends and being social and taking part in activities. So, I was well on the way to proving that I hadn't actually missed out on anything, that it had been a pause instead of a crash and burn. With as long as things have gone so far in this pause, there's been talking and weighting and discussion about what risks are acceptable, especially in the face of the potential gains, and we've been working through what kinds of activities can be done and what the requirements would be for those activities so they can be enjoyed. It's meant less missing out on things and more being deliberate about the choices of what's going to be enjoyed and when. We even got to see Barbie in the theater this year—because the theater itself was nearly empty for the showing that we went to, and that was an okay risk. (And the movie was funny.) It's taken some time and negotiation, and expressing our feelings and our beliefs, and establishing what the protocols are, but we're to the point where activities are not an automatic no based on their risks and the situation outside.
There are other spots where I feel like there may have been "missing out." Many of them are tied very hard to the American Dream idea that is sold to us as we grow up, where every man and woman are expected to have found their soulmate, gotten married, had their average 2.3 kids, and either gotten or be working toward a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. The whiteness of that dream is pretty apparent on even a cursory analysis, and similarly the relative privilege of generational wealth, good wages, and savings that are not specifically targeted by get-rich-quick schemes or people who want to enrich themselves by deceiving others and stealing their money, that makes it possible to believe such a dream will be achieved. If I hadn't grown up in a household that fit this particular situation, I might not be chasing it quite so much (or I might be chasing it more.) Being older allows me to see where I'm looking at this with emerald-tinted glasses, but because it's still a core measure of stability for me, there's the danger of believing it uncritically always present, and therefore believing I've missed out on the opportunity to achieve it. On my more lucid days, I recognize it for the glamour that it is, and I'm still quite happy with what I have managed to build with others, but there's still some deep cultural conditioning pulling at me, telling me that I'm missing out, that I'm supposed to be continuing the line and passing on all of my excellent genes to a child and raising them properly and well. Even if I look at everything the way it is and laugh at the thought of adding the expenses of one child to it, much less many children. There's still the idea that I have become Christmas cake, and that I have been for a while, and therefore, even though I've still got a significant amount of time before me (fingers crossed!), I can only consider my life a failure, no matter what happens in the future. (Yes, despite having the house, and the advanced degree, and a household of people who I like and who at least tolerate me. And the cat. And friends.)
It's hard not to look back at the time that I spent doing important and productive things, like degrees, careers, and desperately clinging to the hope that things would get better, and not feel like some amount of that time was wasted. I still have sympathy for that past self, the one who was convinced there wasn't anyone interested in them, the one who was trying very hard to make something fundamentally broken work in whatever way they could, the one who thought they had achieved everything they could and there would be no further good things for them. They were doing the best they could, and that this me has more wisdom and has seen the other side of many of their issues and worries is a testament to them as well. We both wish that things had turned out differently, that others had been more direct, that the terrible person should have realized how terrible she was and broken it off rather than entrench herself more. The remedy, though, as keeps getting told to me by others, is to acknowledge the past as a thing that happened and to build on the present. After all, I've already achieved things that those past selves would not have imagined for themselves, and rather than chasing the achievements of the past, I'm trying to make things work in the present and with an idea toward the future, to do the things now that I want to do (and wanted to do in the past), and I'm succeeding in those spaces perfectly fine. And the more that I manage that particular feat, the less I'm going to feel like I missed out on valuable time and more like it was a phase of my life where I wasn't able to do the things that I'm doing now.
Thanks for coming along on December Days this year. Tomorrow starts another calendar year, and as one does, we'll be participating in the
snowflake_challenge, since it really helps start the year off well with fannish commentary and people coming back around for a little bit, even if we then drift off for the rest of the year.
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Date: 2024-01-01 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-01 08:22 pm (UTC)