November like a racehorse

I turned thirty and I had friends from school over, plus my brother, and we sat around my dining room table. I like having people over for dinner, and in my new place I always knew I wanted a table big enough to fit at least six. And then I moved here and had no friends. I looked at my new table and thought, why did I get rid of my old table? It comfortably fit one and generously fit three, and in this new city I would have had to work to find the three. But then I panicked too soon, as I always do, and then when it came down to it, it wasn’t that hard at all to find six people. When we sat down for dinner, I thought - my table’s full. My table’s finally full.

Grad school is more like I thought grad school would be like. It’s definitely more like I thought grad school would be like than how I actually through grad school was like when I first started. This week is reading week, and I've been meeting various friends on campus every day (downtown today because campus is closed) to do homework together. We had an event for the school and then a dozen of us went out afterwards. There is that easy kinsmanship that I imagined. There’s a lot of homework, too, but I can write papers pretty quickly.

One of my classmates, Marcy, had her sister and her friend come to visit over the weekend, and they wanted to go out dancing. I don’t like going out dancing, even though at moments I like going out and at moments I like dancing. Marcy’s sister is sweet and married and used to be very good at flirting with strangers at bars, and now likes to set up other people with strangers at bars.

I think there’s this stupid perception of women being competitive with each other that I have never experienced in real life. In real life, a friend’s sister, who theoretically must only like me vicariously, decided that I didn’t have enough confidence, and felt compelled to tell me every time a guy looked at me, and what about him, what about him, what about him he’s been looking at you all night.

I have had kind of a lot of nights like that. I wonder, how insecure do I seem? It’s accurate, I guess. I hate myself and then I don’t hate myself and then I do again. I’m good at making friends, I know that. Marcy said the theme of the night was slutty, so I wore a short but loose dress, red with black polkadots, and one of those harness bras. Every time I see one of those, I feel compelled to buy them, even though I don’t actually love the way the style looks on me. It was easy to make friends with Marcy’s sister and her other friend; we were showing each other our bras within the hour.

It’s funny what a difference familiarity makes, how uncomfortable I am around strangers. I liked dancing with Marcy and her sister and her friend and her friend’s cousin, but I didn’t like it when her sister brought over a guy for me to dance with. There’s something about people in clubs. They must be real people. All people are real people. But when I’m in a club, everyone who is unfamiliar to me seems otherly. It’s not just that I don’t know them: they are Other. I don’t want to get to know them. I don’t want to dance with anyone I didn’t come with.

A girl came up and told me I was beautiful, and I thought, that was nice, and then I thought, I wonder if she felt sorry for me. I think that’s probably why Marcy’s sister thought I needed a confidence boost, even though I didn’t tell her, or any of them, what I thought. I’m probably a little drunk now, even though I do feel like the jagerbombs sobered me up. At the end of the night, we got drinks with tangerine vodka and redbull and they tasted just like Flintstone vitamins. I think I hate myself the normal amount, but I know it’s easy for me to make friends. I’m doing well in school, but that could end at any moment. I guess sometimes strangers like the way I look, but I never notice them noticing me, and I don’t like it when other people point it out.

It’s funny to meet new people because they have different perceptions of you than your long terms friends. I’ve heard quite a bit from new friends about how it seems like I overthink things, and how much of a type-a I am.  I actually don’t know if that’s different than what people who have known me for years think. I don’t think I’m type-a, just a normal achieving kind of person who wakes up through the night and can’t fall asleep because she’s worried about everything she has to get done. I was up this morning at six am - not accomplishing anything, of course, just fretting. It’s late now. I had to write out this post as a distraction from how genuinely unnerved I felt being around that many strangers and, at least in little slices, having to acknowledge that those strangers could see me. But I guess it could also just be the redbull. Thirty isn’t that different from twenty after all.

Settle In

So we stayed up late one night to try and get our problems right.

I was sitting on the bus, riding home from campus, scrolling through my Instagram feed when I realized that I had gone all week without feeling homesick for Toronto. It’s strange to phase in and out of connectedness. I live here now; I used to live in Toronto; I miss it; I haven’t thought about it in days. It felt like I had never lived here. I was so dissociated for all of my teenage years, it’s difficult to believe they actually happened. And now I’m back here again and the city is starting to feel real for the very first time.

I didn’t like the people in my program and then eventually I did. I remember when I was taking social psychology, like ten years ago, the professor talked about who a guy came to class every single day wearing a garbage bag, and at first it was like, “what a weird, off putting guy,” but then by the end of the semester, the students loved garbage bag guy. Was that a study or something that actually happened in one of the professor’s classes? I can’t remember. In my program, it was more like the various garbage bag people were blocking the nice ones from view and it took me a long time to track them down.

Tonight I went to a potluck with the ten of us who are doing the same specific focus. It’s what I imagined grad school being like: that kind automatic belonging with your cohort. One of the guys brought his guitar, a girl her fiddle. Two of the girls sang New Romantic, by Laura Marling. I watched them and I watched the room and then I watched myself watch the room. That’s like dissociation, I guess, but I don’t know how to experience something without also experiencing the process of experience it. Discursive institutionalists call that sentience.

I’m turning thirty in a week. My classmates asked me what I was going to do. I said probably just dinner with my family, nothing too exciting.

One girl said, “You should do what you originally planned. Do you remember what we talked about?”

I shook my head.

“You said you were going to go pick up young guys at a club.”

I laugh. “I said I didn’t want to go to a club and be a cougar.”

“And I said that you didn’t have to hit on younger guys if we went out.”

“Well,” I said.

I think the usual crisis of turning thirty is the achievement crisis, but I haven’t felt it. I’ve talked about it with other friends who already had their birthdays, how their lives aren’t where they imagined they would be at thirty. Maybe I should be feeling it more because I’m back being a student, but going back to school hasn’t made me feel any younger. I feel like a thirty year old who’s gone back to school. I’ve done a lot of things; those things counted.

Except then I’ll  feel like maybe those five years when I worked were just a dream. The entire closet in my second bedroom is full of blazers. I tried every single one on last night and they all looked terrible. My boobs are too big for blazers; it’s not a style of clothing that looks good on me. I have a whole closet full of clothes from another life and now it’s so obvious they don’t fit. I remember sitting in my office at work and thinking that I was going to start screaming because I felt so trapped and sad and bored. Office life is a fishbowl. Everyone else is just as bored and so they’re watching, always watching, and I always felt like the weird prawn trying to swim with the goldfish.

Going back to school is still full of all kinds of stupid conflict, but I just don’t feel upset like I used to. I think about how much I drank before, and how much pot I smoked. I don’t know how to reconcile the genuine happiness and connection I felt with the people around me with the number of nights I self medicated until I was numb enough to fall asleep on the couch while Netflix autoloaded the next episode of whatever show I was rewatching. I feel like I spent my late twenties becoming my most genuine self and also like I was a bad imposture muddling through someone else’s life.

I don’t know how to reconcile how nice my parents were when I went to their house for dinner last night with how horrible they were all summer. They didn’t end up getting divorced.

I was seventeen when I started my first degree. I was dating someone. My hair was sort of short. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. A couple of people from my class were saying that they were going to interview a woman for one of our assignments, and I realized I knew her. We had gone to high school together, and now she has the kind of position that grad students want to learn from. Thirteen years and I’m sitting in the same classrooms in the same university. I keep hearing the same names.

Coming back, it’s felt like time is a circle. I’ve never lived here before; I’ve never lived anywhere else. I was probably nineteen the last time I walked through the specific area I live in now. I didn’t have a specific idea of what my life would look like when I was thirty. I could never imagine myself married, I could never imagine having kids. I think I’m able to skip the Turning Thirty Achievement Crisis because I never had a strong idea of what I thought my life was going to look like. I just wanted to be happy.

Sometimes I think I’m happy.

More and more, these days.

I'm the first to admit that I'm still pretty young.

tape it up, walk it off

I started grad school today.

--

Earlier this summer, mom asked, "Are you still using your purse these days?"

"Yes."

"Well I was going through your backpack and your wallet’s in there.”

I texted Karen: Why was she even going through my backpack?

And Karen texted back, And then what happened?

And then nothing, I said. And then I was quietly mad about it for however many days I stayed mad about it until there was something new to be mad about and then I was quietly mad about that too.

“Everyone knows it’s difficult for adult children to come back to their parents’ house,” my dad said. We went back and forth about that lot: it was normal for everyone to be upset all the time; it wasn’t normal and there was something wrong with me; it was just to be expected; it was unacceptable.

I went out with friends from high school and a girl who I hadn’t really been close with before but who I very much liked now said, “It’s like after a certain point, parents regress. Like they’ve raised us and now that we’re adults, they can be kids again.”

Her parents had gotten mad that she’d tried to eat some of the dip they had been making for their own dinner. That night, she’d slept at her old place in a nest of blankets because the rest of her furniture was already gone. She was moving to another city for a new job.

--

I slept at my parents’ house last night because the seagulls keep me awake.

When I decided I was moving back, I didn’t know where I wanted to live. Then I found this place right across the street from the ocean, and it was like, oh, yes. I’d missed the ocean. Toronto is not a beautiful city. It would be hard to leave, but it would be okay because, look, I would be living across the street from the ocean.

And then the flooring was delayed two months. The painter finished 90% of my condo but not the rest. I lived at my parents’ house while the work was getting done, except it seemed like the work never would actually get done. I bought a dining room table and delivery has so far been twice delayed. After that going away party, I didn’t see any of my high school friends for the rest of the summer. I looked at the pictures they posted on instagram of themselves partying. Somehow I had forgotten that the entire time I had lived in Victoria, I never had real friends. Before I moved, my brother who lives in Vancouver said that I could come visit him, but then he got a girlfriend and I didn’t hear from him all summer. My parents fought constantly, claimed they were going to get a divorce. They didn’t. I told my brother about our parents' fighting and he didn’t respond.

I felt trapped and miserable, but all the friends I still had in Toronto said it would be okay once I had moved out of their house and into my condo. I just needed to wait until school started.

In the beginning of August, suddenly my knee started hurting. It was like that pressure that comes before you need to pop a joint, only my joint would never pop, or it would, but that didn’t make it feel better. Sometimes the pain was sharp. It ached when I lay in bed on that side.  

--

A couple of weeks ago, my mom was mad at me. After giving me the silent treatment the entire day previous and then yelling at me that morning, she said that the thing she was really mad about was that I seemed so scared of her and Dad. She wanted me to stop acting like they had traumatized me.

--

I had slept at my parents house the night before school started because mom thought it would be easier for me to sleep there. They lived on a mountain where there were no seagulls. I brought the cat over. In the morning, Mom made me scrambled eggs and toast and saw me off, which was nice.

Then, while I was at class, she emailed and said that I needed to come back, get the cat right after class, and sleep at my apartment from now on because her and Dad were fighting. When I came for my cat and my chargers, it felt like I was getting kicked out, never mind that I already lived somewhere else. She sent me back to the condo with leftover meatloaf and chicken breasts she had made just for me.

I got back to the condo and did homework, because I already had homework. The program seemed hard and boring and was full of people I didn’t like as much as the people I already knew, only I didn’t live in the same city as those people any more.

Before the sun set, I crossed the street and went for a walk along the ocean by myself. There were two fit girls running away from me, but then they doubled back and ran toward me instead, except it wasn’t the same girls after all, just two different sets of fit running girls that looked identical. When they passed each other, it must have caused a glitch in the matrix. There were a couple of guys lingering at the rail, talking about how high the tide had risen. The waves sounded very slushed where they were hitting the boardwalk. The seagulls were loud.

I looked at the ocean and thought, This was supposed to replace everything else.

I was mad at how thin the waves sounded. School had started.  I was living at the condo. Officially living at the condo for good, now that I’d been kicked out of my parents’ house. I was in front of the ocean. The sky got dark, but I couldn’t see where the sun had set.

--

When I got home after the walk, my mom emailed and said that Dad had left her and was now going to Vancouver. My brother called to find out what was going on for the parents the first time that summer, finally worried now that Dad was going to be coming to see him in Vancouver. Dad called as he drove to the ferry and said that I was supposed to go over to their house that night to look after Mom.

I stayed at my condo, called my mom, twice, but didn’t go over. I fed the cat, made a cup of tea. This blog post is now longer than the pre-assignment that is due tomorrow. It took a lot less time to write.

--

When I went into the massage therapist about my sore knee, she said she didn’t know what had happened because knee pain usually came from a trauma, and mine had started out of nowhere. She said I could tape it up when I walked, like in the shape of a U or an X.

She said it would get better, but that, as I knew, knee pain held on for a long time.