It’s killing me. I’ve been fighting with it for over a week. It works both ways.
The last year of high school was horrible. I went to my 20 year class reunion, talked to many people about what I was sure was foremost on their minds when they saw me: the fact that I was ridiculed and shunned my senior year for being in a relationship with another woman. Ha. Come to find out, it was a passing thought to most of them; most of them were as caught up in their own personal angst back then to not give a shit about what I was going through.
That was a good lesson for me to learn: my reality is not always the reality of others. Just because I assume someone thinks negatively of me doesn’t make it so.
And now it has hit me again, in a more painful, but still, I suppose, a lesson-learning sort of way. I have fond, warm memories about certain things in my past. Certain roommates, certain old lovers, certain friends. As years go by, I’m sure we all change. I know I have changed, yet when I think of those people, I imagine them to be exactly as they were 20 years ago. I imagine that they feel about me exactly as they did back then. Why does it always surprise me when they don’t? They have changed, they have moved on, OF COURSE they haven’t been sitting around for the last 20 years with their lives on pause, waiting for me to reappear so they can push play again.
Why can’t I learn the lesson this way? Why do I continue to beat my head against a brick wall, waiting for them to come back, waiting for our friendship to start again, the way it was? It will never be. Those people – me included – are not anymore. Why is that so fucking difficult for me to accept?
My insistence on seeing and feeling the past as present is holding me back, preventing me from enjoying the wonders I have now. A good friend (from the past AND the present) said to me recently, “You have an idyllic life – from the outside”. She’s right. The only thing preventing me from having it on the inside as well is me and this goddamned nostalgia.
