webcowgirl

I have a few folks out there in LJ land that are very tut-tut at me about how I did nothing but talk down people in Seattle and my experience there.

Tonight, at home, alone in my apartment (while

shadowdaddy is back in Seattle-land), I'm reminded of how I felt living in Seattle most of all of four years ago. I was damaged goods, I was a waste of a human being, I was bad on the inside, I was not worth being friends with, even though I was 35 and had been trying for years to be a good person and trying to find good friends. I was most of the same person that I am now, but because of how a group of people treated me, I felt not only incredibly lonely, but really sadly broken. I believed there was no hope for me, that people just would never like me. (That time is blogged quite well if you want to read back that far, but since I try to avoid LJ drama like the plague it is, I don't talk much about what is upsetting me in those posts. It's just day after day of bleak and lonely and snow, my guts a little Narnia, my heart overwhelmed with the splinter of glass that said, "You will have no friends, ever. You cannot figure out how to do it and nobody wants you. Go hybridize dahlias or raise poodles or something so you're not just a waste of space.") This went on for months and months and months, pretty much from August to August, building up little pieces until I formed my very solid conclusion about my fate in life as a person of little worth. I mean, really, if that many people who had known me for so long saw me like that, how could I not think they were right?

I think that someday I'll just let it all hang out and tell it to the world, so the people that think I hate Seattle "and everything in it" can nod their heads and say, "Ah, now it all makes so much sense," but really, moving forward is generally healthier. (I'm saving it for my graphic novel, anyway.) And in some ways so much of what was making me miserable was what was happening at home and the fact that I felt like I couldn't talk to anyone about it, but the feeling of being so utterly worthless was very toxic to my brain. (Amusingly enough, this psych book I was reading Saturday night was talking about how this feeling of being icky and damaged is a key element of people's sexual fetishes, but somehow the two never got linked up in my head. I still get shut out of plans of people I know, but it doesn't get me all hot and bothered. Go figure.)

I feel much better now, and fairly regularly, even though tonight I'm sitting in my empty apartment drinking flat, warm cider and getting ready for a (bleah) 6:30 AM shift at work. Boo-yah. In 2004,

ergotia,

ciphergoth,

spikeylady, and

lilithmagna convinced me I wasn't worthless, and I decided that I would move moth-like toward this light and toward the person they treated me like rather than the person I'd come to believe I was.

Thanks, guys. And thanks to all the rest of you here, and thanks to the people I met after that summer that made Seattle better to live in after all of the crap had happened.

I'm still marching along with the Proust, and I've hit the halfway mark in volume 1. The narrator is happy, but you can feel that things won't last. Proust has just stuck a long passage about how art that advances its art can only become appreciated later, once it's had a chance to influence people, which seems to me like the author saying that he is anticipating his book will not be well-received. I'm alternating it and the third book by Richard Morgan - brutal cyber-punk versus dreamy late-19th century reveries, what a difference!

Anyway. Home. Alone. Drinking. Tired. Going to bed soon. Please take care of

shadowdaddy, for me, Seattle folks, and hope that while he's there he can find the happy that hasn't been coming to him since he moved.