As The World Falls Down

Do you ever reach a point in your life where you feel like you are running your ass off on the hamster wheel but still watch everyone pass you by? That's how I feel right now... and it's annoying as hell.

I'm not in the dark, deep, depressed state that I get into every once in awhile on a rainy day; but I do feel like a toy train that has slipped its track while its wheels still turn and turn... and turn. I know that everyone gets into ruts and that sooner or later most people manage to crawl their way out of them but this is way more than just your typical rut, this is the mother load of them all, this is a meaning of life rut.

While no Rhodes Scholar, I know that I am an intelligent, well educated woman who possesses a certain girl-next-door charm. In high school I dreamed of becoming someone and had a ten year plan sketched out in my mind, I had a purpose, a goal. I wanted to leave my own mark on this planet and change the lives of countless people; I was just missing the small detail of how to accomplish this - and that's what I figured college was about. Then college happened and I was left in my dorm room watching other women head off to parties at the local coed schools and wondering how I ended up being such an outcast. Not to mention that MoHo made me feel like a backwoods (un)educated idiotic redneck... a feeling I had not felt prior to my first semester of college and one I did not enjoy.

So I ran, or at least tried to. Fast forward 4 years and two more colleges and I finally had my BA... and was even more lost than I was when I started my path towards a secondary education. I keep wondering now where I went wrong while also cursing fate that it would provide me with the love of literature and the idea of being a writer but none of the talent needed to achieve it. Which is fine, but it would be nice to have the slightest inkling about what my role during my short time on this earth is supposed to be. So far my 27 years have not amounted to much: no career, minimal friendships with people I rarely see, no great love - just a mountain worth of debt and a lonely existence in my one bedroom apartment where I hold a very strong love affair with my DVR.

Yet the more I reflect on where I came from the more I realize that I have ALWAYS been lost and an outcast and not in the black sheep misunderstood angst ridden teen way. My social outcast issues are far more serious because they fall under the blanket of that the vast majority of people I meet do not want to spend time with me. While I value the close friendships I do have odds are if you called me on a Friday night you'll find me at home in my pjs watching TV because no one called to ask me to go anywhere. And if I cannot develop a social circle how the hell am I supposed to network in the business world? I can't sell something that no one wants to buy into even on a casual level. This coming June I will have been out of high school for 10 years... and that plan I had back then? The only part I have accomplished is living on my own. 17 year old me thought I would be married with a great career and planning for a first child by the time I was 27. I have failed my teenage self... and that's such a painful feeling.

Over the summer I told a friend that I was taking a break from the game (of boys) because I kept making bad decisions. He told me that I could tell myself all I wanted that that was why things weren't working out as planned but my real reason for taking a time out was because I had lost my confidence and that I needed to get it back. How can you get something back that you never had in the first place? Every time I jump in to bed with someone I climb out of it less sure of myself. But when I take a step out of the circle instead of being left unsure I'm just left being lonely with pent up sexual frustrations. Maybe my confidence has suffered a staggering blow but there's no one around telling me how amazing I am to help speed the healing process along so at this rate nothing will ever change.

Every day I crave the lives others live, wishing I could be even just a small percentage like them, however, being left on the outside for so many years can only breed discontent. I hate those who have a happy, fulfilled life that they share with a partner. I envy those with big enough balls to shrug off the repressions of modern society to walk to the beat of their own drummer on a quest to develop a deeper understanding of who they are and what their role is.

I'm beginning to think that I really need to start talking to someone, a professional, who can help me dust off the muck that has gathered on me to reveal the diamond that is inside. But something far greater than the lack of insurance and money to cover the years of therapy I'd need is keeping me from starting to do some research on finding a psychologist that will fit my needs - and that's body freezing, breath stopping fear of what that person might uncover in my psyche. What if it's determined that I'm a hopeless case? That all I can expect from life is what I'm getting right now, that I'm not cut out to join in the dance and must find a way to content myself with my role of being on the sidelines for as long as my heart keeps on beating. If that's my role I don't know if I want to continue, maybe it would be for the greater good for me to, as Shakespeare put it, "shuffle off this mortal coil".

Perhaps Christopher McCandless had the right idea all along and he should not be mourned with sad comments about him starving to death alone in the wilderness of Alaska or ridiculed about how idiotic he was to think he could survive without the basics for survival or the knowledge of the area. Perhaps he should be praised for the urge to shrug off all that is comforting and familiar to trek out and discover who he truly was as a person. Then again maybe it was just a romantic nature based suicide plot and instead of soul searching McCandless was running from having to face his own fears about life; in the end only he knows why he went off into the wild and returned in a body bag. It must have been a beautiful backdrop to have your last visions of though.

Running away and ending things seems such an easy solution when the world is falling down around you...