Missing Pieces

I miss my mother lately. Or rather, I suppose, I miss the idea of my mother. I miss the mother that I know, deep down, she wanted to be. This longing started before the holidays when a coworker, coincidentally also named Sara, decided to bitch about having to spend the holidays with her mother. I was….annoyed.

Now I won’t claim that I never bitched about my mother. Quite the opposite, mostly likely, though rarely because who cared or wanted to listen? People found her to be an angel. But the conversation with my coworker touched a nerve I couldn’t quite put my finger on at the time and I found myself marred with unnamable emotions afterwards. It took me a few weeks, but I realized that what I was feeling was a weird sort of jealousy. My coworker Sara still had the opportunity to bitch about her family, where I did not. Her complaints, while they came from a different place than mine, still had value. I find myself in the weird place now of wanting to reach out and talk to the mother I always pictured mine wanting to be.

Moreover, I think I was sad that she could complain at all–because that is not a luxury I am afforded.

In elementary school, I had a friend named Alannah. Staying at her house was the highlight of my week–she had several horses, though the only one I can remember so many years later was her dark gray dappled pony named Roadrunner. He was the first pony I ever rode. I can still remember the horror in her voice as she stared down at me from his back the first time we hung out in her barn.

“You’ve….never ridden a horse?” The way she said it made it sound akin to me running over an animal with my bike. The pity that littered her gaze made me feel small.

“N-no,” I stammered, as I ran my fingers through his mane. I don’t know what I expected, exactly, but I took note of the fact that it felt absolutely nothing like the manes on my My Little Ponies.

“Oh my god. Do you want to?” She was already sliding off his back without waiting for my answer; I was on Roadrunner’s back before I fully comprehended what was occurring.

I had the time of my life that afternoon in the dusty barn. We took turns on Roadrunner’s back. Alannah was a good teacher for her age, and Roadrunner was an excellent pony. As the sun set and the dust settled in the ring, we braided Roadrunner’s shiny white-gray mane and giggled whenever we put a “girly-colored” bow as the end of one of the braids.

It was all fun and games until Alannah said, “You won’t ever have a pony, will you?” I read her tone as snotty, but as an adult I don’t think she was being intentionally mean–she just didn’t understand a world that wasn’t like her own. And she was right–I would never have a pony. But I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t say my feelings were hurt. I couldn’t say anything at all.

Late that night as I laid on the trundle bed in her room while she slept and I, quite simply, could not, I stared at her dresser and the photo there of Roadrunner, his mane braided and his show gear on. Before I could register I was doing something wrong, I crept to the dresser and snatched the photo, slipped it in my backpack, and left with it the next morning as if nothing was amiss. I could have a pony—at least in photo form.

The call from Alannah’s mother to my grandma went something like this:

“I believe Sara has taken something from my daughter’s room that does not belong to her.”

“Oh, Sara would never do that.”

“If that was my daughter, I would spank her until she could no longer sit.”

My grandma always did believe the best in me, even when I didn’t deserve it. And when she found out that I had, in fact, taken the photo, she sat me down on the couch to ask me why.

My little kid fingers clutched the edges of the picture frame as I held it out to her. “I wanted, for just one second, to pretend that he was mine.”

What I didn’t say: I wanted, for just one second, to pretend Alannah’s LIFE was mine. It goes without saying, but I’m not sure Alannah and I were friends after that day. I’d always had trouble keeping friends; always did something dumb that caused me to lose them. And most every relationship I’ve formed has been deeply superficial.

I can’t remember the last time I had a friend. I don’t mean the coworker I say hi to and shoot the shit with or the girl I occasionally text pet pictures to or even my roommate. Those are acquaintances. I mean a friend. I know so many wonderful people. But I don’t know how to make true friends. Someone I can talk to without being judged; someone I can tell everything and anything to; someone who won’t criticize me unless it’s deserved; someone I can actually count on. I don’t think that’s necessarily anyone’s fault. I just don’t know how to do it. It feels like I give and give but won’t get much if anything back, and then I get tired of giving and then things stop. I am not sure if I’m choosing the wrong people, if I’m giving up in the wrong place in the relationship, or what precisely breaks things. But I just finished Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s book and she actually sums up my friend experience quite well:

“The Disney Channel shows were always about friends and love and I had an idea of what a friend was, but I never had a long term friend…So many things about me were already so different than other kids…I was too complacent and complicit with the way things were. She (her mom) would get upset if I asked too many questions. So I just accepted the way things were.”

I attract people who want me around because I’m complacent and complicit. Because I do what I’m told. I know this because many have told me this. I know this because, when I do try and be myself, it feels like no one is listening. No one wants “my self” around.

I couldn’t have friends, couldn’t keep friends, because that was just the way things were. Acquaintances? Sure. But I wasn’t like everyone else. I couldn’t tell Alannah that, when she told me I would never have a pony the way she did and made me feel like I was less than, it made me jealous and hurt my feelings. There was no safe space that I knew of in which to say those words. I was not supposed to have feelings. Feelings got me shut in my room in the dark, got my head shoved into the filled tub, left me with bruises. I could not express them. I would not. It was better.

Until it wasn’t.

It’s destroyed every relationship I’ve had. My ideals of a “true” friendship, of one with give AND take and someone to count on will never exist, not for me. And I’m lonely, and I’m tired, and I’m growing older every year, on my own. It says something when I kept a therapist for years after her therapy stopped working just because she was someone I could talk to–even though I suspected after a while that she was no longer listening. That she became such a “friend” when she should have been a blank slate that I can no longer trust the process. That I thought of her as a friend when she was someone taking my money and nothing more.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this or what I was trying to say. Just that, I think, if there was ever anyone who should have been mine to talk to, it should have been my mother. It should have been, but it never was. These past weeks, since the holiday and beyond, where I’ve been wishing I had someone to talk to? I believe I’m missing the person I think she perhaps always wanted to be but absolutely never was. I’m missing what I never had.

And, at my core….I fear that my mother and I are the same. She too lived a life full of acquaintances—and that was all there was.

Wrong

The first time I went “nice clothes” shopping was with my mother’s long lost high school friend, Jo, in sixth grade. I can still remember the three items I got—a whole OUTFIT—jeans, a branded shirt, and the nicest, softest, gray sweater I had ever touched. (Ps, I only just recently got rid of that sweater. It truly lasted so many years)! Jo laughed when she saw how excited I was about the new things. “Have you never been clothes shopping before?” To this day I can still picture how amused she was, her fancy highlighted ponytail swinging as she chuckled with her eyes.

Never was a strong word. I’d been clothing shopping. To Kmart with my grandma, aka the land of generic cartoon logos and Velcro sneakers with fake My Little Pony and clothes that either tore or outgrew me within a few months max. My grandma did the best she could, but moved away when I was eleven. My mother, in her own way, also did her very best. We shopped in thrift stores after that and I never realized I should mind that. At least not until middle school.

I was suddenly all wrong. I wore track suit pants with button ups, colors and patterns that didn’t match, shoes with no laces that I was too old for. Rest assured, my classmates made sure to point it out to me, every single instance I was incorrect.

“Don’t you know you can’t put those together?”

“Did you know that you could wear green with yellow but you shouldn’t wear green with purple?”

“Don’t you know how to dress yourself?”

So I tried to fix it with makeup, by way of bright blue eyeshadow I had no idea how to apply. Grown up me realizes that I must have looked like a clown. My mother didn’t really wear her makeup much, except on what I assume were random date nights. She’d never taught me. I tried to mimic what I’d seen at school or on tv; it was on my eyelids, probably my brows. Certainly my fingertips because what was a brush??

My mother stood in the doorway behind me. “Who told you that you could use that?”

I froze and stared at my clown face in the mirror. I hadn’t meant to wake her up. I hadn’t wanted to get caught.

She snatched the shadow palette from my hand and cracked it against my temple. “You should know better! You got this everywhere! Didn’t you know to use a brush?? Didn’t you know this would stain? You make me want to scream!”

I fell into the sink. I didn’t cry. I shouldn’t. Couldn’t.

I didn’t. I didn’t know. I did something that I didn’t know and I was wrong. I did this on the regular. This was just the most light of examples, and the least colorful bruise that was left behind.

And she did scream.

As an adult I still haven’t learned how to be wrong safely. Even in the most innocuous of situations, being wrong makes my brain a shit storm.

I went from my mother to a man who told me what to say and how to do my hair and what to wear and where to work and dictated my daily functioning for six years. Maybe more? My years with him blur together now. i think I stayed with him because I knew no other way to be. I could not be wrong. Wrong had consequences. And my brain remembers this, chemically. That is PTSD. That is not something I can control. There are actual chemical synapses in my brain that fire in response to different stimuli.

I wish people could understand that. I wish I could explain it better. Chemically, my brain is TERRIFIED. There have not been enough positive experiences of wrongness to help my brain rewrite history. Honestly, I wonder if that will happen in my lifetime. Because it’s gotten harder and harder to try the more I fail.

I wish I could explain it to my brain, because it’s out of control sometimes, but nothing makes it stop, Nothing. Not drugs, nor years of therapy. Nothing. Overwhelming flashbacks? Those are 99 percent in the past. But these tiny brain misfires? They keep me from being social, from having fun, from maintaining friendships, from doing anything REAL.

I’m sick of it. I’m tired.

I’ve never wanted to be someone else more than I do lately.

Tragique

The orchestra lunch table was full the day I got back from what I assumed to be my infamous in-patient eating disorder vacation. I hadn’t been to the lunch room in longer than I could remember, preferring instead to take my “meals” in unattended classrooms and empty stairwells. I stood—as I picture it now in my adult brain—massively awkwardly, as I tried to figure out how to ask if I could still sit with them. It had been too long, I decided, as I turned away.

“You can sit with us!”

I guess I didn’t have to ask. Of course not, it was Steph. The very epitome of “You CAN sit with us.” Inclusive. Lovely. My childhood best friend. And one of the greatest people I ever knew.

Steph is gone now. Killed this time last year by some ass-faced drunkard who does not deserve to be named as she was riding her bike just a few blocks from home. The girl I shared birthdays with (four days apart, she was older), the girl whose house I hid at when mine was too much (did she KNOW the things that were going on in my home?), the girl who would literally give you the shirt off her back before letting you be cold. She won’t see 40.

I will though. And that doesn’t seem fair. It isn’t fair.

I had another pair of friends, twins that lived down the street. I’d sleep over at their house a lot due to proximity (getting to Steph’s required a car.) One night when we were in middle school, our animal covered sleeping bags spread all across the floor, I lay pretending to be asleep as their brother crawled into the sleeping bag with one of the twins. I thought Oh, this is normal? This happens to everyone? I thought it was just me.

It was not normal. But it was not just me.

I don’t remember when Steph and I stopped having sleepovers, stopped hanging out. It happened gradually I think, and then all at once as I allowed high school and my mothers boyfriends and the abuse to destroy me. My childhood friend, the one who believed in me more than any other friend? She could never know. No one could. And I think I thought that if I disappeared, she wouldn’t have the chance to see. Because she was Steph. She would have seen.

That dissolution of our bond, despite being neither or our faults really, is my greatest regret. I always thought there would be more time, that I could back and apologize for the mess I became, for the fact that (really I do not have to apologize for) I grew up being taught by my environment to feel ashamed of who I was and my circumstances.

I have that shame still. My therapist said she doesn’t believe in discussing the past, that it’s not worth it. But I disagree. I disagree because I to this day don’t have many friends. To this day, I struggle to negotiate relationships. To this day, I blame most everything on myself. And I hide who I am and what I’ve been through.

I wish, more than anything, that I could talk to Steph just one more time. That I could let her know that that day at lunch was the key to my survival for my remaining high school years. That I could let her see who I was. Because she would have loved her as much as I should have.

So. Hi. My name is Sara. And I’ve survived a lot of shit.

And I am thankful you are here.

What Was I Made For?

The last client of the day today was a very tiny kitten. A very tiny, very dead, kitten. A day gone at least? Maybe two. The owners wanted a paw print, but the baby was so stiff I heard the leg crack as we tried. I felt another part of my soul die when the sound echoed.

I used to float, now I just fall down
I used to know but I’m not sure now
What I was made for
What was I made for?

30 some odd year old me was so full of dreams. I came to this new state to escape, sure. But I also thought I was gonna do all this…stuff. People around me thought that too. I was gonna write and I was gonna teach and I was gonna be this amazing person who turned all my garbage from the past into something useful and good that could help people. Somewhere along the way, I got lost. I didn’t teach. I barely write. I haven’t made a difference, not the one I wanted.

Takin’ a drive, I was an ideal
Looked so alive, turns out I’m not real
Just something you paid for
What was I made for?

None of this life I have is what I pictured I would become. It’s so small, my world. I play so many video games that I really should get paid to do so, but I don’t know how to market myself. I make art that I can’t share because I worry no one wants to see. I write words, sometimes. I carry every harsh thought deep in my soul.

‘Cause I, I
I don’t know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don’t know how to feel
But someday, I might
Someday, I might

I am…sad for the life I think I was supposed to have that’s lost. For the girl who can’t ever grow up and sits alone in her room with her ferrets and her cats. Who went home for a weekend and tasted connection and realized everything she’ll never have here in this place.

When did it end? All the enjoyment
I’m sad again, don’t tell my boyfriend
It’s not what he’s made for
What was I made for?

There was a fire on my train this morning, and I realized that in my current state, my tiny world orbit, if they hadn’t evacuated us, people might not notice me missing?

‘Cause I, ’cause I
I don’t know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don’t know how to feel
But someday I might
Someday I might

I need to find that difference again. So this is my…manifesto of sorts. My statement of my desire to find it. that thing that I’m made for. I was happy in undergrad. I know I was. I was confident. I’d never had that before. And then I lost it. Thank you grad school; thank you pandemic; thank you soul sucking job full of death on the daily.

Think I forgot how to be happy
Something I’m not, but something I can be
Something I wait for
Something I’m made for
Something I’m made for

And PS, special shout out to Billie Ellish for making me cry on the subway. Good thing no one cares here. 🙂

On Confidence

In fifth grade, our gym and our auditorium were the same giant room. One entire wall was the stage, a chipped brown wooden beast ensconced by a blood red curtain. Possibly literally? The blood of many preteens and their sports. Not that I would know. I was never asked to be on a team.

That particular day was dodgeball day. My classmates were already grouping themselves as our teacher picked two “captains.” These two students, supposedly picked at random but usually the most talented at the game, would alternate picking students to be on their team, one by one, until no one was left. Well. Until one was left. Me. Always.

They stuck to the groups they’d already been forming at first. I sat on the edge of the stage, my sadly worn-out red gym shorts swishing as I kicked my feet against the wall. One kick for each student who wasn’t me. If I’m last this time, I told myself, I’m walking out. The smallest little piece of me let myself hope it might not happen.

But it did. To add insult to injury, both teams verbally refused to pick me.

So I walked out. Out of the gym. Out of the school. Out to the playground, where I sat on one of the little black children’s swings. I didn’t cry. I tried to think, hard, tried to remember when it had started, when the other kids had stopped wanting me to be a part of things. Fourth grade, when I’d had lice? Or before that. Maybe kindergarten, when I cried because someone cut the hair off my Totally Hair Barbie after telling me they “just wanted to play with her.” Or third grade, when my teacher made me sit on an old red milk crate outside the classroom because she’d caught me with my thumb in my mouth. Fifth grade, when I couldn’t hold my cello bow correctly because of my weird thumbs? WHEN DID THEY STOP ASKING ME?

Maybe it was that birthday party, the one with the dolls. With their house.

I don’t know. I can’t place an inciting incident within my timeline.

Perhaps I never fit in at all.

I quit my job this week. I was talking to someone who said I was happy there once. I disagree. I cried in the bathroom my very first day when I realized I’d gone from running my own company to being ordered to mop a floor. Literally sobbed. (Thanks, Covid.) The other employees would go out, hang out together. They threw a goodbye party for my then favorite doctor, but they didn’t invite me. They’d go to dinner after shift, regular Korean BBQ nights, but they didn’t invite me. Not once. In three years.

There was one night, a single time, a coworker asked if I wanted to go see a Stranger Things show/exhibit. Her roommate had cancelled on her and she didn’t want to go alone. I love Stranger Things, but I also loved that SOMEONE ASKED ME TO DO SOMETHING. Of course I said yes. We had a lovely time that night, I think? She even told me after, “You know I was worried this would be weird or awkward, hanging out, but it wasn’t.”

I didn’t think too much about that comment until now, as I think back and realize that, in the year that followed before she moved away, she never invited me to do a single thing with her after that night. I wasn’t even invited to HER goodbye party. I have not the slightest idea where I went wrong. I showed up to work and I did my job, and it’s probably the only area of my life where I existed NOT as a people pleaser. Because the people pleasing WAS doing my job, and doing it well.

When I quit this week, no one asked me to stay.

I wouldn’t have. Stayed. But I wanted to be asked. I am irrationally saddened that I wasn’t. I wanted to know that the three years I’ve spent here meant something. In reality, they meant nothing at all. I’m just that sad little girl by herself on the swings.

And now I have to start all over, for the fifty millionth time in my life, with still precious little knowledge as to why I don’t fit in. It feels like I’ve lost every single connection without the skills to make new ones that won’t get ruined. I don’t have the confidence. I’m not sure I ever did.

Loser

I’ve written about her before—L. Her birthday party when we were….11? 12? It was Lisa Frank themed, a fact I only knew from the invitations in the hands of my classmates. That’s right. She invited every single one except for me. It was devastating at the time, because everyone I knew was obsessed with Lisa Frank’s colorfully unique universe. We couldn’t afford that stuff at my house, but I wanted those rainbow animals more than anything.

(Don’t judge. We were kids; we didn’t know how awful she was to her employees back then.)

I cried in my language arts teachers room that day during lunch, the spot where I ate every day because there were no seats for me in the cafeteria. Ever. Someone was always “sitting there.” My childhood bestie, who DID have a seat in the cafeteria, told me when she found me after lunch that she’d bring me stickers from the party.

I cried at home that night as well. Not even for the party, really, but for the exclusion. My mother, never one to really notice these things, asked when I told her “What’s wrong with you that you weren’t invited?” She joked that I was a loser. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, and she couldn’t tell me.

Looking back as adult, I can make a list. Our shower didn’t always work, so I probably smelled. When it DID work, I didn’t always wash my hair. Or other things. The psych major in me decrees this was an avoidance tactic—my mothers boyfriends wouldn’t touch me if I was gross?? Maybe?? And I always had my nose in a book, which probably didn’t help matters any.

I was WEIRD. Maybe my mother didn’t realize it. But I did.

I can’t remember a time when I felt like I fit in. Ever. One of the last birthday parties I had, before I stopped inviting people over, I was maybe 7. Possibly 8. I invited K and S, and they brought Barbies because what ELSE would little girls do? K’s doll traveling case, which expanded into a mini Barbie house, cracked at one of the hinges. My mom’s boyfriend of the moment bent over her. Said “I could fix this. For a pretty thing like you.” I panicked. Dragged them outside to play ghosts in the graveyard in the park. None of us had a good time. I rarely invited friends over after that, and only when nobody was home. I’m sure my school friends wondered why. Or maybe they knew, and it was just one of those things we never talked about.

Recently, a friend from way back told me she found out she’d known me since we were super little. Her mother was my daycare teacher and would bring her with to play with me because none of the other kids would. Neither of us remembered this, but it definitely checks.

There has always been something wrong with me. Some vital skill that it feels like I never learned. There’s just too many things I don’t understand. And I’m too old now to not understand. I’m not that dumb animal obsessed girl in the cafeteria anymore. New therapist suggested that perhaps my CPTSD has masked something akin to asbergers, but I’m not sure that’s right—I don’t know that I have enough of the hallmarks. And honestly, the two diagnosis’s blend together in surprising ways. I protected myself for YEARS learning how to be a certain ways, and now I’m uncertain how to be anything else. I branch out and I try new things and I fail. I try to understand people, I try to blend in, and I fail. I try to carry the burden of what everyone wants, because who the hell knows what I myself want? Certainly not me, so please don’t ask. And I don’t know why I put that on myself because I fail there too. Nothing in life feels safe, secure, solid. I am lonely so much of the time. I don’t know how to share my feelings, and when I do try, they’ve been pent up for so long that they come out completely wrong.

Everything I do has to be right all the time. It’s exhausting, but I can’t stop. I can’t stop, because bad things happen when I am wrong. I don’t know how to process people being angry. I don’t know how to BE angry. And there’s so much to be angry at. I’ve tried so hard lately to acclimate, to figure things out, but I can’t seem to get there. Every time I feel like I’m doing better, things somehow get messed up even worse. Communication is a key I don’t always carry.

I wanted to be a writer because I thought it might help my brain be…normal? So to speak. Communicate better. But all I learned when I travelled a 1000 miles from home for grad school was that so few people want to hear what I have to say. That I still don’t fit in. That I stand out in all the wrong ways. (Or disappear into the background? Which honestly, I prefer.)

I think I just have a brain that’s permanently fractured. And I think that I am tired.

Death and All Her Friends

Today a dog exploded on me and died.

Honestly, for all the things I’ve seen and done in vet med at this point, it never really occurred to me that dogs could explode and die. But she did. And she’s gone. And I’m covered in her goo.

My first ever dead dog experience was my grandma’s Maltese, Max. I was maybe eleven or twelve. He was much older than I was. My grandma and I used to make fun of Max on the regular. He was deaf, but I maintain to this day so many years later that he was hearing selective. He had a little red and white squeaky porkchop that was the light of his whole world—the shrillest, most obnoxious, little toy to ever exist. He had it almost his entire life. He didn’t go anywhere without it. Forever a child brain at that point, I named it Porkchop. And when we got up and found Max dead one morning, I tucked it into the Green Bay Packers blanket before we wrapped him up. I couldn’t touch him without pretending he was asleep. Told myself the entire drive to the vet that he was just sleeping, that he wasn’t waking up because he couldn’t hear the car.

Selective hearing? Be damned.

My third day in vet med, (after eight years of dog walking, so I’d seen some stuff, but), I walked into the back to get some water and almost fell over a dead nearly 200 pound Great Dane. Doc had gone on a housecall and then brought it back to leave it in the middle of the floor while they figured out how to keep the enormous corpse until the crematory could pick up. I almost quit right then and there. Locked myself in the employee bathroom and cried for all the dogs I used to walk and the utter stupidity of Covid and how it cost me all the work I used to love more than anything. How it sent me into a field where clearly I would face my greatest fear—death—on the regular. But I didn’t quit. We’re coming up on three years now of death and all her friends. I’m still standing. I don’t cry anymore when pets die at the clinic. I am sad, but I compartmentalize it. I go home, and I play video games.

Today a client brought two chihuahuas in for their first exam in a few years. Covid happened. A lot of people lapsed on these things, no one is judging. (Except also, we are judging, sorry, if we say we aren’t we are just being polite.) One of the dogs was coughing when they walked in. I thought “Hmmmmm. Kennel cough? Or heart?” And I went about my day.

Three hours later, one dog was still there. The cougher. She was in oxygen as she waited for her owner to take her home. He came in and was the sweetest man. Split her bill between multiple cards all the while scheduling an echocardiogram for tomorrow that we all knew he couldn’t afford but he would do anyway because he loved that little dog. He would do the best he could for her.

The techs brought her up straight up to the front from oxygen and gave her to her dad wrapped in a green towel. Her tiny brown eyes peered out at me as dad wrapped up his third charge card. Even as he put that last card back into his wallet, I could see how much it hurt her to breathe. But she tried, for her dad. She tried, and then suddenly her nose was exploding red, bloody liquid and her eyes were rolling back as fluid came from every possible spot fluid could pour from.

I took her back to oxygen; I dragged doc from a room. We called the SINGLE ANIMAL MEDICAL TRANSPORT in the greater NYC area to try and get her to a 24/7 facility for hospitalization. Called five times. They couldn’t come for at least four hours. She couldn’t be without oxygen.

We did everything we could, but she died in the oxygen chamber as her owners said goodbye. I listened to their howls of pain in the treatment area as I futilely tried to scrub her fluids off my clothes. And then I had to resume my day as if nothing had happened, as if she’d never been there at all. There were more clients to see. Pets to save.

Please. Please. Do regular checkups, especially on senior pets. And please, for the love of god, be nice to the staff at your vets office—because yeah, we play with puppies and kittens sometimes, but our job is mostly like it was today. It SUCKS. But we keep coming back. We LOVE your pets. And we get treated like SHIT on the REGULAR.

She came in for a past due annual exam.

Her name was Sobi.

On Work and Being Nice

Today I stood in a tiny room with paper thin walls, clutching my second Monster energy drink of the day against my lips to hide the expression on my face as I endured my second major annual review in three years at my vet clinic. This one was different than the first—instead of just HR, the owner was also in attendance.

She started out by saying that I was her most dependable employee. She thought I’d be pleased. She realized I was waiting for a but.

It came by way of the words of my coworkers, written in their circular reviews of me (reviews in which, by the way, I made every effort to say something nice for every single person whether I liked them or not). They accused me of being type A and too detail oriented (maybe in some ways?), of not remembering details correctly when stressed (possibly sometimes but I didn’t think at work), and being too confident in my misinformation (what misinformation?)

“I don’t even think you know you’re doing it,” she said.

I asked for examples. They couldn’t really give any. There was mention of a PE I did for a client where the wife told me their dog was bitten by a tick on the right hind leg, but the husband told doc it was elsewhere. She called this misinformation, and she said I reported right hind so confidently that they can’t trust that confidence.

But I’m their most dependable employee. Their most dependable employee, yet none of the reviews from my coworkers had anything nice to say. Because the good part of me likes to think they would have balanced it out if they had.

Is this gaslighting? Or am I truly doing the wrong things? I’m not sure how to tell anymore.

I’m just not….liked. I’m almost 40 with two bachelors and a masters and two advanced certificates and I’m stuck in this job (doing work I love, mind you) where it feels like I’m doing everything all wrong. Where no matter what I do, no matter how well I perform, I’m making somebody angry. And I genuinely don’t understand how it’s happening and no one can explain it.

All this tells me is that there’s something wrong in my brain. There’s something that doesn’t work right, that doesn’t let me be like everyone else. There’s something that I don’t understand about the way my brain works, and it keeps me from interacting well with others. It keeps me from interpreting interactions correctly.

Silly little me, thinking with my brain the way it is and the disability that I have that I could work with the normals.

Silly, silly me.

NOMV exists for a reason. Please be nicer to each other. You never know what someone else is feeling.

Easy

My mom didn’t teach me about tampons.

I knew, as all girls did, of their existence. I knew that was how I would enter the swimming pool during our safety patrol class trip that day in early spring, 1995. But I didn’t know what to…do with it.

I sat alone in the multi-stalled bathroom of the indoor water park in my sadly hopeful neon pink and green bathing suit staring at the glaring smear of blood that indicated my induction into womanhood with a horror akin only to my mother’s face the day I tried out the blue eyeshadow.

We’d seen the movies, of course. Every fifth grader had. The girls got “this is what happens when a woman becomes a woman,” and the boys got “this is what happens when a man becomes a man,” and we all talked and compared notes and got in so much trouble by our teachers for using “the bad words.” And I’d read Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by then, not knowing at eleven that it would be banned in the future. I’d read other things too; I’d had much education about the workings of my body.

But I guess I’d thought it wouldn’t happen to me? That maybe I wasn’t a real girl, and therefore wouldn’t be a real woman, so it was not a problem I would have to deal with amid all the other problems that addled my fifth grader brain. I clutched a tampon I paid a quarter for from the vending machine I felt almost too short to reach and peeled back the wrapper. This was the days before applicators were compact, so it was already primed and ready to go.

I don’t know why I thought I’d never get a period. But here we are. Or rather, there I was, sobbing in the mildewed, dark, waterpark bathroom stall as I tried to figure out how to tell my classmates, friends, whatever we were to each other then, that I would not be going in the pool that day because nothing was going up there. Ever again. Not today. Not ever.

The tiny wad of cotton stared up at me from between my not quite eleven year old fingers with an intensity reminiscent of humanity, despite possessing no signs of life. It taunted me, all white and hard but also kind of fluffy at the same time, and I threw it into the little silver bin on the side of the toilet stall wall hoping that would shut it up.

It did not shut up.

The words flooded my brain: Put me inside. It won’t hurt. Join your friends. It’s really that easy I swear. Gentle words. Innocuous words. Don’t you want to go swimming? Easy. EASY. Nothing in life was easy.

I swore the stupid little thing was laughing at me. I did want to go swimming, very much. But I let my fear drown the words out as I stuffed my swimsuit full of toilet paper (because what else did one do in such situations???) and crept wearily out of the stall and back to the vending machine, all the while fumbling in my swim shorts to look for another quarter to get myself a pad. Apparently it was a poor day; I was all out of money.

“Oh, do you need a quarter?”

In my blood-induced stupor, I hadn’t even heard another girl come in. She was older, one of the eighth graders on the trip, and when I froze she bypassed me and went directly for the machine. With a quick twist of the knob she produced…another tampon.

“Here you go!” she held it out to me with a smile. “Enjoy the water!”

Didn’t she see how upset I was? Didn’t she see that I was different, that I was a woman? And how did I use it??

I chose not to say any of those things. I chose not to say anything at all, simply walked away and threw the tampon in the trash before going to the edge of the pool to dangle my feet in the water while pretending I didn’t really want to swim that day. Lies. All lies. But nobody saw me. I was invisible to all my friends, afloat in my own cloud of sadness that none of them could see.

The eighth grader from the bathroom waved at me from across the water before plunging head first into the deep end.

I imagined, from my prior education, that it worked maybe the same as the men who’d been inside me. Only smaller. Compact. But even at the age of not quite eleven, I knew better than to ask someone. I knew not to say anything at all.

Sit Down and Shut Up

I am that person. That one that loves the act of working. It gives me purpose or some such. I wouldn’t say I love every job I’ve had, and I’ve definitely loved some jobs more than others. (Dog walking, I’m looking at you as the favorite!) But the act of working though. That’s where it’s at for me. I like that I go to work at the same time and come home at the same time and do the same variety of things on a regular basis.

When I was 14 years old or so, I worked at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Loved the coworkers for the most part. Hated the actual position. I loved, however, the routine of it all. I loved the feel of the raw chicken, (never claimed to have a normal bone in my body), loved how making it was a multi-step process that was never supposed to vary. Step one, open bag. Step two–spicy? Not spicy? Dunk in respective coating. Step three, coat in some other gook. Step four, re-dunk in coating. Step five, fry! I lived for that routine; it was so much more entertaining than mixing coleslaw in a giant plastic bin. I would sing as I went through the steps.

I remember liking my coworkers and thinking they all liked me.

Then there was G. She was a manager in a permanent state of hangry, despite spending most of her waking hours surrounded by fried chicken goodness. I was standing at the fryer one day, singing a song from Little Shop of Horrors, when she came up behind me.

“Would you stop that?”

“Stop what?” Making chicken? I was confused, and literal, as always. Looking back now, I don’t think I even realized I was singing. Singing was as natural as breathing.

“Singing. Just. Shut up and stop singing.”

And so I did. I left that job a few months later, taking care to never sing in front of any of those coworkers again. I had to do what they wanted.

I carried the tendency to burst into song over to several other jobs, weathering comments about how weird, how annoying, how TOO MUCH it always was. Until one day when I just…stopped. In fact, I stopped doing a lot of the things I loved. Singing. Music of any kind. Drawing. Writing. Like I didn’t deserve to do them anymore. Like they took up too much space.

I took up too much space.

There’s something wrong in my brain. I’m either too quiet or I’m too loud. I don’t want to be around people, but I also DESPERATELY want to be around people. I need my things neat and orderly. If they aren’t, I can’t keep track of them. Routines are paramount to my daily living–I eat the same things, I play the same games, I always do things as close to the same time as possible. Time is super important. I must be on time for all things. And on time is at least 15 minutes early. I don’t really have close friends. I won’t talk about my day unless somebody directly asks, and I will be sad when inevitably nobody asks. I find it devastating when I do or say the wrong things, and I find that I do it a LOT. I want to fit in, but I don’t know how to “people.” I’m incredibly empathetic internally, but I don’t always know how to show it externally even when I really really really want to. I get REALLY SUPER EXCITED about certain things to the point of obsession and just wanting to talk about them all the time. I have a lot of issues with touch. I struggle to let things go.

I’m terrified of my own ideas.

I hate being wrong. I hate doing wrong.

Which I guess leaves…what’s right in my brain?

I brought this up to my therapist, suggested some things Dr. Google thought it might be. And she said it’s all trauma. Like all my things. It’s because of my trauma. And that she doesn’t like labels. Maybe she’s right to some extent. But I don’t think that’s all of it, because to say it that way makes me feel…damaged. I don’t think all these things fall under PTSD. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps, per usual, I don’t really know anything at all. Maybe it is all trauma. Maybe I just have a brain that cannot get out of it’s own way. That cannot brain.

All this to say…

I am tired. I am tired of always feeling like I don’t belong. I am tired of feeling like my ideas aren’t valid. I am tired of feeling like there are just so few people who care. I am tired of feeling alone. Distanced.

I am tired of my brain.

Sit down, brain. Sit down and shut up.