Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
people do love me after all
it’s true – my friends really do want to spend time with me – as evidenced by all the replies i got to my birthday invite. hooray! we will have a fine dinner at the buddhist vegetarian restaurant – i haven’t been there since i moved out of the city.
why should this be such a surprise? why is it that every time i throw a party i’m afraid no one will show up? here i am (almost) 32 years old, fiddle-player in a folk band, with a large social network, a track record of community involvement, and a good professional history and career – and i still feel like the outcast i was during my public school years. this is something i have been thinking about the last few days as i have been working on my child development course and finally got to the sections about adolescent identity and the development of self-concept.
(this is why i shouldn’t take psych courses, i already have a tendency to over-analyze and this just give me more fuel to do it with).
in any case, i won’t bore you with the inner-details i have been working out, but when i think about the little girl in school who one day had friends and the next day had none (due to some little-girl meanness in my former best friend christy emery, the fickleness of little girls in general, and probably some outcast tendencies on my part), i feel really sad for her. i feel pretty badly for the girl who got picked on throughout all those school years and some of the places she ended up as a result.
terrible things our society does to young people who don’t fit in….
the thing is, i’m still a bit of an outcast – being an anarchist who works for the government and does union involvement, wilderness travel and music (and thinks that we are on the brink of social collapse) – there isn’t one place where i am entirely comfortable, and there never has been…. but this doesn’t mean i am unloved, or unliked… it doesn’t mean the work i do professionally and politically doesn’t have an impact…
i guess what i am saying (thinking) is that fact – i still carry this little girl grief around in me, and i have managed to build up a fiction around that which says – “you aren’t good enough and no one loves you”….
and that is simply not true.
2 Comments on “people do love me after all”
Red Cedar 
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Thank you so much for your comment on my blog on this very subject. You made some really good points. I’m hoping to incorporate much of what you wrote into my attitude…