the depths of self-pity

here's a real blog:
FUCK

which was going to be the title, but my rational self, even now, told my emotional self that I would regret that later on ...

ever self-contained,
fermenting within,
bloating,
so full because there's no one to share with --
the sadness and self-pity of those barricaded by pride.

But I'm still proud of my pride.
It's all that I've got left.

I've only cried like this once before -- wailed, really, sobbing, manic -- within this past year of anxiety alternated by apathy and disinterest (in everything). It was when I was talking on the phone to Mark, sitting on Ken Sharpe's porch, and realized that I would leave to Linz (the plan at the time!) and we, as friends, would never be the same again. That I would lose the best friend I'd ever had, though I'd never known it till it was gone.

The reason this latest onslaught arrived was upon news of the progress of the Green Chair Dance Group and their plans, together, for the future. To Poland, in the summer, to Linz for the boys, to London for Sarah and Ben, poor Hannah to suffer but not terribly finishing her last year at Swat.

Wherefore this agony? Is it longing? Is it jealousy? Why this ache, this anger? From whence the righteousness, the sense of injustice, almost: the violence?

Upon this latest news, I see my dreams a flight, and I -- left at the terminal. Was it my dream, upon graduation, to start and maintain a dance troupe? No; but what they represent to me that hurts me so much is their success in friendship and in dance that I somehow cannot seem to achieve in any arena. I feel like I, alone, am a lesson in missed opportunity, worse than failure -- either because you never really gave it a try, or because you survive well through the attempt in order to regret it. I feel pretty stupid and useless like this. It's a feeling that just makes me want to throw something around, or drive into a brick wall, or scream (more likely option). I do all this research, over and over again, and I do nothing with my ambition. I do not have a vision for my future except that I no longer want to do it alone.

Why the insistence on difference? Why my insistence on hardship? I discover in conversations celebrating the achievements of my peers that for any sort of artistic or social innovation, among my first instinctual questions is, "Is so-and-so American?," as if manifesting such dreaming is only allowed for the American and not for me. I have possibly been my worst enemy at the worst times, and it's through this, this attitude of foreigner pride in the distinction of cultural difference yet incapacity for action that has limited me from bringing significant things to completion.

Of course, I am truly happy for my friends and their achievements.
And yes, I value my place in having supported and in some instances vaulted the possibility for their coming together.
Yet I feel unvalidated.

Yet, as I said before, I am almost all the more so proud of my pride.

Well, perhaps a more perverse, but more acceptable way of saying it is that I am proud of my guilt.

Because the truth of it is that every one of my choices and my non-choices and my choices to not make a choice were by virtue of pride, and guilt. I was too proud to be around on campus after graduation -- prying eyes were everwhere, quickly fatigued as the inmate, once friend, shuns the freed; I was too guilty to run off pursuing wanton dreams in far off lands while my (expensive, mind you) education had done nothing but teach me of the many underserved and unprivileged, unlike myself.

(Now, what on earth does a far off land entail to someone who in the span of her lifetime has thus far made regular trips half way around the world and back in order to establish a sense of home on three different continents? WHAT?!?!?!?! Am I proud of my current sense of landedness, my fear of travelling? Does this equate to a sense of rootedness?)

So playing poverty, living under the dime and dollar, playing like I haven't had the opportunities I have had -- and ignored, or missed the deadline for, or didn't want, or didn't know about -- makes it OK that I am not a success. It even makes it that I am not a success rather than a flat out failure. This is what my skewed version of right social action has been for a number of years. "Do badly," I would encourage myself, "it's what you deserve. And it's all you can live with."

I find myself wanting to blame someone of course, but I've released Mum a short while ago as being the root of all personal ailments. That habit has been rather unfair, and cruel.

I want to blame Sarah for ruining my dancing relationship -- or rather, dancing opportunity -- with Greg and John, who were robbed of me my senior spring after our successful fall semester together to study abroad. I want to blame Sarah, who stole my initiative of the Green Chair Dance Group as her final senior dance project. I want to blame Sarah, who now has done the worst of it and stolen my dreams.

But I am making a big effort to be nice to Sarah about this. (Let me remember for future reference though, my friend Youssef who has been out here in NYC for a year, by himself, now: age 19: "Fuck nice -- you gotta hustle.")

I also have to learn to be careful, and patient, with my dreams. Maybe the article Mum sent me was not far off, the one about the Singaporean inventor of the thumb drive, who counselled future inventors (hey: that's me) not to patent before having a strategy to conceal the product during the three year (?) waiting period for the patent to actualize. I am an inventor of movement right now without a laboratory for experimentation, without a cohort of fellow scientists, with my first invention stolen because I left it lying around, unprotected. So now what? Now What?!?! Maybe home isn't such a bad idea, to start afresh. Old milk goes rancid, and in the mouth burns but lays sticky a mildew, a coating of the desire for vengeance.

I told Greg it might all be over. I may not dance again. The crest in his voice, the instinctual arc of sadness, makes me see a glimmer of hope. It is the same disappointment in Juma's voice hearing the same, my continual self-doubt, stifledness, fear, that similarly makes me rethink my own negativity.

It doesn't change the fact that I've not been this afraid before. This is not acting class. I don't go home to anything else but this -- me, my loneliness, my ineptness.

It doesn't sway me from my growing conviction that I may actually be classificably, medically, ill. I'm not sure what it would take for me to actually seek mental health treatment -- I suppose someone in a starched white jacket might just say instead: "Get over it! And exert some will power!" -- but I have been making my own self-assessment based on recurring thought patterns and behaviours over the last three/four years.

Yet the hopes of my friends, even though they are not mine, keep my buoyed above "drowning in my own self-doubt" more so than they may realize.

The truth, tonight, (sorry), April 19th 1:02am.