Earlier tonight I decided what my post would be about for Tuesday. Then I got caught up in all the blogs about TC08. (Oh, and one disclaimer before I really get started - It’s not a big pimpin’ Friday and I’m tired so I’m not gonna link all the names I drop. Most of them are in my blogroll and most of them you already visit anyway.) I checked out that Uppercase Woman blog. Several things struck me about her post, but the one thing I seriously took away with me from her blog was this - I’m not an uppercase woman. Every time I type the letter “I”, I have to backspace. i am clearly a lower case woman.
Mr. Shiny and Hilly beat me to the punch with confessions, which isn’t surprising at all. I come late to things except work and appointments. I came late to blogging, only having begun in January of this year. The internet has always been a safe haven for me. I can be all the things that Life won’t let me be in the realm known as RL. Here, on the net, I can be a person who has strength and humor, who is fearless and fun. It’s funny to find that when you’re almost half a century old, that you are still the wallflower that you were at 18, 25, 37, and 46. I know that, faced with all of you in the realm of RL, I would either say totally the wrong thing, say nothing at all, or try too fucking hard to fit in. Because the truth of the matter is that I fit nowhere. Not even inside my own skin.
My truths are not as painful as they once were. I guess the passage of years is good for something, if only to dull the edge of the pain. Venues such as blogs are my medium. I am a writer. I’ve been one from the moment I could hold a pencil and string words together. Writing is my way of expressing myself because Lord knows, I do a really shitty job of it when I open my mouth. I don’t tell my child often enough that I love her. Yet, it’s very easy for me to rail at her and make her feel bad because she won’t take out the trash. And I know, if she wasn’t here… I would be truly alone. There is a comfort in the fact that she is typing away in IM in the next room. If I died in my bed tonight, she might not know until tomorrow morning, but at least I wouldn’t be dead in my bed for weeks with no one to find me. And I’d like to think that she would miss me the way I miss my mom and dad.
I am trapped by a wealth of fears that I can escape only when I write. When Adam wrote that he spent two thousand dollars going to TequilaCon, I realized I would truly never be able to go. I couldn’t string together $200 let alone ten times that. I have a job that doesn’t have any room for growth. I have a degree that’s not quite finished, so another, better job would be a stretch. I make a measly $40K a year (and no that’s not a slam against the company I work for, but more of a testimony to my lack of earning power) and live paycheck to paycheck to put a roof over our heads. We have been homeless countless times over the past 10 years. My credit is wrecked and so is whatever self esteem and hope I had at 18. Except when I write.
Putting the words here to make you feel what i feel is all I know how to do. I do it here, and at the Bar. Now I’ve submitted my 6K words to the Pink Chair Diaries, so maybe my words will reach another audience. Still, even though I want to meet all of you, feel a huge yen to meet you… if I did meet you, I wouldn’t know what to say, or would say something heinously stupid. My mouth cannot string words together the way my fingers can here in this medium. i am afraid to meet even one of you. Here, you like me. IRL, maybe you won’t.
So my Tuesday Truth is this, even if i had the money to come and meet you, i might not. Even David from BellaDaddyBlog, whom I have known for 30 years, and whom I will always love… I’m afraid to leave my hidey hole to see him. I have failed on so many levels as a person that I am afraid to try to make friends with someone only to fail at yet another thing.
So here I sit with my words. Cold comfort, I hear someone murmur. Yes. Sometimes they are, but in the end they are all I have to show you who i am. Because if I do manage to meet you, you’ll probably have a hard time making out those words, as I mumble them around my size 9 foot that will more than likely end up stuffed in my mouth.
