... A little rain must fall

I'm feeling a little melancholy today after a really nice day with Sharon yesterday... perhaps it's a sense of anticlimax. Or it could be some other things that are preying on me. But somehow I can't dredge up a funny or happy reminiscence for today. What's coming to mind are the times I felt rejected, excluded, omitted, ignored. Inferior.

When we were kids I always felt like we were outsiders at any family gathering we attended, on either side of the family. Both grandmothers had their favourites and we weren't it. Perhaps it was because our parents were the rebels in their families, the ones that left the hometown behind to join the military, to have lives that were out of the family's sphere of influence. We almost always lived far away and were impoverished so visits were few. But even when we lived in the same town it was like we were just not as important as the others... add-ons. It's still that way and it has spilt over onto the next generation.

That sense of not belonging spilled over into other areas. I often felt as though I was a spectator, always on the sidelines observing others living. I had very few friends as a kid, spending a lot of my time reading, listening to music and teaching myself new crafts. Moving every couple of years as we did when I was a kid is really hard on someone who feels like people are only tolerating their presence and waiting impatiently for them to be gone. Whether it was true or not, it made the notion of making new friends in a new place almost torture. I still tend to hang back and watch how things unfold, only becoming involved when it starts feeling safe; I prefer the written word to face-to-face interactions. Perhaps that's why I'm so successful as a moderator on the website I work for: it's all at arms-length. I worry about meeting the other staff because I expect them to be disappointed with the reality of me.

It's ironic that I'm so introspective today of all days... my 51st birthday. Our personalities are shaped by the experiences of a lifetime, but none are as important as the early ones. Patterns develop that are very difficult to modify. Being given enormous responsibility at a very young age has made me tend to take responsibility for things that should rightly belong to others. It's a role I'm comfortable with, but wish I wasn't. I'm working on that. I need to start putting me first. I just don't know if I can.