Growing up

I worked hard at growing up sometimes -- at outgrowing my childhood fears. Other times I tried to be invisible and sometimes I went whole weeks without talking. I did things that scared me, like going to parties -- and things that I thought were truly cool, like jumping out of airplanes. I desperately wanted to be tough and strong and brave and in every respect but one, I may have been. People scared the piss out of me; given the ubiquity of people - goddamn them - I was pretty much scared all the time. I spent a lot of money on alcohol and endured some truly miserable hangovers in order to overcome my social anxiety. I did some exceptionally stupid things, none of which killed me or anyone else, but that was just lucky. I pretended that I wasn't afraid.

Eventually, I settled into a life that I mostly think is pretty cool, in which I like my family and my friends and very rarely do things that I agonize over later. The raw events of my life are perhaps not as interesting as they used to be -- but they're not as self-destructive, either, and overall, I'm happier. In the past couple of weeks, I've had an odd sort of retrospective of my relationships with members of the opposite sex -- weird out of the blue phone calls and emails. My, like, romantic history -- although I don't think I could say that word out loud without sounding sarcastic, and the absence of romance is pretty much a prerequisite, because it makes me queasy. Not, if I'm being honest, because I find it wholly repugnant, except that I don't trust it. All of them live in different states and most of them have gone on to marry very nice women, most of whom do not like me.

I'm not in touch with everyone I've ever, uh, related with. Just some of them call me -- I don't know why. Partly, I think, because I'm the only unattached woman most of them know, and there's nostalgia, and all that. This is not phone sex or anything like it -- it's just hey-how-are-you stuff. Usually, I'm happy to hear from them, happy to know they're out there and doing okay. It doesn't usually strike me as a reminder of failure; actually, I don't know if I ever thought of it as failure because I chose to end the relationships. Somehow, that seemed like success. The relationship failed -- I won. (And now that seems wrong at so many levels it makes my head hurt...)