Out With the Old, In With the Newfangled

We are now seven full days into 2006--so I think it's safe to say that 2005 is definitely over. For me, it was officially over when I woke up friday morning and and thought 'if so many people I know have confidence in me, why do I so violently doubt my own abilities?'

I think I started to doubt--and throttle--myself around Black Friday--that day after Thanksgiving and the beginning of the Holiday Season. It was unconscious at first, but I know some of it had to do with residual guilt over not going down to New Jersey to visit my father for that particular holiday.

And I knew it would get worse as the Holiday Onslaught steamrolled us with pop culture images of Family Perfection--and things in my life would become less than Martha Stewart-bourgeois perfect.

As December rolled along, so many of the seeds new things that were sown after I attended BlogHer in July started to germinate: a profile was due for SXSW, making it clear that I would certainly be attending and on a panel (my first); the final draft of my article (complete with my own blogging story) went to the editor; I got an offer to do some pro blogging (possibly for cash).

And, surpringly, an admirer made his intentions abundantly clear. Wasn't expecting that one.

Along with all this, my friends were dispersing or withdrawing, the result of their company folding and a poor local job market. The Going Away Parties started. My friend Gee moved to Seattle. Two others had a wonderful holiday party, but it was early in the month and underscored, for me, the fact that they, too, might eventually be moving away. Other friends were very busy with family and business stuff...and I started to ruminate on what my familial responsibilities might be for Christmas.

Meanwhile, conversations between myself, my father, and my godmother began to deteriorate. There didn't seem to be much to talk about, and I was getting tired of my father's dirty mind and my godmother's "lovey, lovey, I love you" sing-song cooing with little real conversation.

I shot thru alot of money during that time, too...and started beating myself up for not working a nine-to-five job and being in something of an economic free-fall. I started judging myself by others income earning standards, not taking into account that I decided to fly solo at the beginning of July because the job I held, which was only supposed to be a nothing-job, had sucked the creative life out of me. Now, I would have to find work that would awared by contract. I never worked this way before, and, subsequently, got massively frustrated when things weren't rolling in according to the survival schedule I worked out in June. Money is in the pipeline now, but as of two weeks ago, it seemed like I would never see any of it.

My frustration with contracts--the delays, the pendings, the failed and re-submitted proposals--lead to fear and doubts about my abilities and my intellect. There's alot I don't understand about that process, and learning it is like learning a new language.

My desire to do the right thing by my family, and the media pressure of all of what the Holiday Season should be, got me doubting and even hating my bohemian lifestyle.

I began feeling like the Little Match Girl standing outside in the cold, looking in at the wonders of the successful nuclear family, and freezing in the snow.

And then I got sick--some awful flu-like thing that turned me into a sneezing, hacking, pinkeyed mess.

I called my dad on New Year's Day, and just got another litany of things I didn't understand. Listening to him lie and re-lie and try to back himself out of lies he'd told me five minutes before is like watching a tiger chase itself around a tree. I called my godmother, who, all of a sudden, in the middle of our conversation, begins cooing to me "oh, you're just a baby, just a baby." I had to stop her and say "no, Betty, I'm not a baby. I'm 44 years old. I'll be 45 soon. I'm getting too old to even have babies."

I realized there was no home to go home to any more...that all there is back in New Jersey are some people who are no longer in touch with the real world....or whose reality is so vastly different from mine that I'm not longer capable of conforming to their reality.

I'm also no longer capable of sacrificing my reality to bolster theirs.

Maybe this was part of what hit me on friday. Maybe, too, it was dumping all my fears and frustrations in an overheated and whiny 1 a.m. blog post--that I eventually deleted--that did it. The post was full of fear--of that feeling like I am an imposter, that I'm a nothing, that I have nothing to offer. "I am an Anglo-Saxson Protestant in Hindu-Buddhist India--all I want is a sandwich and they are giving me curries and somosas," was the one line from the post that haunted me....

because of the metaphor I presented to myself. and the truth within that metaphor.

My situation has been alot like a journey to an exotic place like India--the past six months like a journey to a strange land of new customs and new ways of life. Things have moved fast and moved slow. Time shifts and changes and doesn't have the rhythum of the average workday--so like life in regions of India that have been only nominally changed by Western ways. The intellectual food is different--but if that food was the metaphorical equivalent of curries *and* somosas, just that I would think of somosas, made me think that the intellectual food I'm being given is food I may indeed know something about already...even if it isn't something I grew up eating.

And that, too, was part of my waking consciousness.

I am now uncomfortable in my physical surroundings--like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. I am not the working-class girl any more, comfortable with the restrictions of the 'hood and a place where only the children use the public library. I am not as ignorant of life beyond the nine-to-five as I think I am--but freelancing is very new to me, kind of confusing, and takes alot of confidence. I'm not Gomer Pyle's daughter, standing there going "goll-ee!" I'm not a Nobody (as I'm wont to sometimes say about myself when I meet big-shots at conferences)--I'm a New Somebody.

And, in my minds eye, I see a small, blue butterfly....a new somebody...

Now, I know this may seem redundant to y'all reading it here--but the thing is that I have to keep re-framing things and understanding them. The best way for me to do this is to detail them, step by step, in black and white.

These past six months I've seen incredible changes, but they are changes that I have not been able to appreciate nor fully understand because I needed to dramatically change my outlook in order to appreciate them. But if y'all know anything about being working-poor, y'all know that outlooks usually don't change, they just get perpetuated.

So, I am throwing away the things I was raised to believe...because, the old Frigidaire and Corvair, they have no use any more.

It's also been like the realization my friend Gee and I came to when we talked about how the words "job" and "career" are used interachangeably when the concepts they embody can be vastly different. It's like the time Lucky Bastard said, "There are lots of jobs here, but few career opporutnities," and I got what he was saying.

It's like finally understanding what my friend Cathy meant when she said "maybe being conventional doesn't work for you."

With the holidays behind me, and a new year in front of me, I can breathe again. Perhaps being sick and sleeping alot allowed my subconscious to sort through everything and get some perspective. Perhaps the unposted whine was the final mental dry heave I needed to clean my system and open it to all the good thoughts and words that many people have been feeding me (like so many good somosas and curries).

Perhaps I am not the West, but I am India in disguise. And you all knew it before I did.

Like so much music, I can hear what y'all have been saying...I can hear your confidence....I understand the tune now. It was in me all along.