blueswede

The Nine Faces of Dave
2003-08-03 06:02:53 (UTC)

vacations shouldn't enhance despair

I just got back in town from California. It was our yearly
trip to visit family, though we also spent about a day and a
half in San Francisco, getting in a little tourism. Despite
being born in the Bay Area, I've never been to San Francisco
for any length of time.

I gained a little weight back on the trip due to restaurant
dining and lack of exercise. It's depressing to lose ground
like this, and it's making me wonder whether my goal is even
achievable now. If I step it up a notch, chances are I can
still hit my goal. It's going to be difficult, though.

Despite the vacation, I'm still dealing with the existential
crisis I've been going through for months now. It's hard to
say exactly what impact the trip had. My mood was improved
during the trip, at least for the most part. But it seemed
like every time I stopped to actually think about things, it
just made me feel shitty. Here were these beautiful, thin,
tanned people, living out west with easy access to the coast
and the mountains, having themselves a great time. And here
I was, their polar opposite, and a native no less. What was
I doing intruding on their space, even with my family there,
even having lived there as a baby? Who gave me the right to
come in and get ugly all over the place?

I never really drew that sort of conclusion before, but then
again, I was never really comparing my world to what I could
see there. And now that I've made the comparison, it's just
contributing to the despair.

Up until about a year and a half ago, I always figured that
I didn't fit in here because of my origins. And for a time,
it made sense. My parents are both liberal Californians who
moved out here because of my dad's job. I was born a little
south of San Francisco, and then lived in Utah until just a
few months before my fourth birthday. So it made sense that
I'd be a lot different from my peers here in the industrial
Midwest, who'd mostly been born here and lived here for all
their lives and hadn't done much travelling. And most of my
experiences supported this notion.

But after the trip, it struck me that I've been subjected to
enough Midwestern pull that "fitting in" isn't really going
to happen. The tendencies from one area just don't work in
the other, and so I'm stuck with nowhere to go. I've become
some bizarre hybrid of California and Indiana, and it really
doesn't get me anywhere.

And through it all, I don't know where responsibility for it
all lies. I could blame my environment and my upbringing if
I wanted, since people seem willing to accept all that kind
of shit. Problem is, that also casts me as powerless to do
anything about it. So I put blame on myself, and then feel
shitty, but at least I stay in charge.

What's worse, I'm not even 100% sure what is bringing about
this feeling, or even what this feeling really is. It's one
part anger and two parts depression, with a few other things
thrown in for good measure. I'm pissed off about the way my
summer has gone. I'm pissed off that I'm not losing enough
weight to keep on schedule. I'm pissed off that scientists
are equated to geeks, and that nobody bothers to distinguish
between watching British sci-fi and being one of those Star
Wars guys who buys X-Wing technical manuals.

And mostly, I'm pissed off that I'm going to be 19 years old
in two days, and instead of really celebrating, I'll just be
marking off another year alone. For all I've accomplished,
for all the positive response I get from people, as much as
I've done my best to be a good person, I've gotten nowhere.
All I've managed to do is lose friends and get even further
into the depression.

I wonder how many years it'll ultimately end up being before
this bad luck ends. It would really be something to make it
twenty years with no relationships.

This is Dave, signing off.




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