Blast From the Past

This was a draft post dated September 28, 2007...I think it is time to dust it off and publish the sucker. Please remember that I was writing about the past and it may not properly reflect what I now feel. I have been working on my perception as perception is so incredibly important! In fact your mind can persuade you of quite remarkable things and some of them aren't healthy in the slightest.

I have been meaning to share a very special blog with you, dear reader. I think the minute you begin reading Orangette you realize what a blog should be: personal, warm, friendly, witty, informative, whimsical and charming. In fact, it is little wonder that Molly met her husband through her blog. For a lovely little real life romance centered around food (a certain lemon cake actually) check out the link to their Food Network profile.

I think this brings home how blogs can bring people together. I know that in the food blogging world (yes, there is one) fellow bloggers have established friendships exchanging ideas, tips, stories, recipes and information. They also actually visit each other. I find this sweet and amazing as I find it hard to even catch up with friends that live in the same city. I think it opens my eyes to what lives other people lead that seem to have sweeping vistas.

For me most trips are carefully, nearly painfully pondered where I have to skirt around possible problems and constraints: financial, time, logisitics, not to mention the huge clothing dilemna. I make everything much harder than it should be and it is all due to insecurity on my part. The actual travelling I relish, it is the process prior to the journey that bothers me. I have this fear of what people from my past will think of me to the point I have hidden when I have seen someone from high school in a store. This is arrogant on my part as I don't think they would necessarily remember me anyway. I usually remember people while they forget. The problem is this fear extends to family and friends. I hide from them too. When I didn't I had to prepare myself for it and I wasn't always successful....

In July of 2003 I went to a college friend's wedding in Maine. The trip in general was fantastic and the wedding lovely, but the night before the wedding I was struck with such waves of sadness, embarassment and a sense of not belonging or fitting in that I couldn't eat (a highly unusual occurance for me) and sat reading some local paper fighting back tears for which I luckily snapped out of later that evening and was in good spirits for the rest of the weekend. Still, I felt awful about my moodiness and inability to deal with the emotions in a "normal" way. In the back of my mind the episode only reinforced my own ideas of being socially inept and too damaged to be much of a friend. I had faced a similar situation at my maternal grandparents' 50th Wedding Anniversary a few years before in which I felt paralyzed by a feeling of profound alienation and shame at being me whilst surrounded by family.

The years following college I had a crisis of identity and I forgot how to related to others. My world became smaller and smaller as I tried to find meaning and understanding about myself. My route diverged from the norm quite radically. I didn't pursue a career nor did I pursue a romantic relationship. My feelings of alienation only increased until I became isolated, anxious, and ashamed. I assumed it would be better to stay out of people's lives than corrupt them. Yes, dear reader, I was maudlin.