Today, I was driving and sobbing, and I had this memory of having seen this woman, she was crying while driving and she looked so much in pain that I wanted to stop her and do something for her. But I was powerless. When the memory closed, I looked around the road to see who might be witnessing my fragile moment; there was no one--Sunday traffic is light--but I stopped crying anyway.
Usually, I'm pretty good at ignoring all of the things that are wrong with me. I pretend that the me that I am is the me that must be.
But sometimes, the walls break down--just a little--and I see what I don't care to see.
(If you noticed that the title doesn't have any apparent connection to the the rest of the entry, you're quite astute.)
11 comments:
I hope that you're feeling better. :-( There's nothing wrong with you -- it's the world that we live in. I promise.
You're sweet. And, to a degree, you're right. In the end, it is social convention and societal expectation that is at the root of my distress. BUT, the me part that is the problem is that I care and that I let the world define what I think is acceptable or unacceptable about myself.
And if you know that people usually respond X ways to Y situations, then it's really really really really hard to do X, even if X is all that you can do. And, it's hard--with or without people--to be okay with X at all.
I'm okay. It was weird to see myself as the woman that I had seen crying while driving in her car all of those years ago.
Sometimes tears are the only way to go though.
I think you hit upon it. Letting the world define what is acceptable or unacceptable about ourselves. I struggle with this all the time. I try to fit myself into the mold and only stop when it gets too painful. I just don't fit. But I think our world and our "mold" here is very small and confining. That our souls belong to a bigger world. Have you read the Ladies Auxiliary? It's like Bathsheba. She doesn't fit in the proper world of this Jewish society and yet her way of being in it is so much more joyous and interesting. I have the book if you want to read it.
Most of the time, I'm fine just being me. But every once in a while, I get frustrated at having to explain or at having people think I'm totally weird. It can get tiresome. At the same time, it is energizing and fulfilling to just be.
I heard Saint-Saens on Sunday. And that is quite a glorious work.
I heard beauty on Sunday as well.
Sunday was beautiful.
At least you weren't sobbing and throwing up. That was me in downtown LA rush hour traffic during a conference a while back. A sobbing woman is a nice poetic image. A sobbing, vomiting woman, not so much.
Sheila,
That made me laugh! And in all reality, I only sobbed for about one minute. And then I couldn't cry anymore.
-Olive
Were you sick, Sheila? Or was it something else?
Kind of both. I was coming down with some weird sickness, yes, but it was also almost exactly a year after my dad died, so I think that tied up with moving to a new job in a new place played into it.
I haven't sobbed and thrown up since then, so I'm making progress, right?
Yes, you are making progress. Sheila, you have seriously been through way too much in way to little time. And I don't mean to sound like a teenager while typing this, but that's the voice that's coming out.
I marvel at how you face the world directly and without pretense.
I wish I were more like that.
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