An Apology and an Explanation

I feel like I owe my readers an apology and an explanation for this three years-long hiatus I have taken from writing on this blog. So much has happened in my life these last few years: My best friend M. wrote me out of the blue and came back into my life. Another friend died of pulmonary fibrosis.  I was professionally diagnosed with autism after a lifetime of symptoms that now make sense. I took and quit a succession of jobs, attempting to focus both on my writing career (my latest short story came out this past April) and remove myself as far as possible from social situations I do not understand. My husband has been diagnosed with emphysema, and I have felt it is my duty as his wife to take care of him. My head is so overcrowded with thoughts that I cannot write for long periods of time at all. And I'm sorry. 

But the good news is that things are slowly getting better. My dad and I found a new coffee shop to go to after our coffee shop of 20+ years shut down and moved to an unfamiliar location of which we have no memories. We have started going out for coffee again each Saturday morning. I am slowly trying to reintegrate myself into the outside world—even though my interaction with society is extremely limited. I turn down all invitations I am given. I have placed emotional distance between myself and others that I am not sure will ever be crossed again—but I am doing it because it is the only thing I need at this point in my life. I have spent so much energy on trying to understand other people and form friendships and then getting hurt that I started to disintegrate on the inside. I need to learn how to take care of myself because I have gotten such little care from other people. And someday, when my husband and parents are gone, I will be all I have. 

Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the edge of the world and looking over into a vast abyss that frightens me yet feels strangely familiar—it is a solitude that has followed me my entire life.  When I was a child I used to imagine that I was friends with the early 20th century singers I idolized and whose photos adorned my bedroom walls at Merisel—I feel as though I knew them intimately through their songs I admired and had memorized. In these fantasies I was loved, cherished, and understood—sitting at a warm table in a bal-musette surrounded by Fréhel, and Damia, and Charles Trenet, and Jean Sablon. But I began to realize that these relationships didn't exist in real life—they couldn't, not just because the singers were long gone, but because it has been my experience that people do not behave like this towards me in real life. But the fantasies are so strong that I have carried them with me for three decades. It is my hope that someday I will find these types of people. But now at the age of 42 it has become apparent to me that perhaps I never will. So I have learned to exist at the periphery of society. And to be honest I'm not sure this will ever change. Not now, in my middle age, with all of the trauma and experiences of my past. In my forties now I have experienced a kind of calm that I didn't have in my youth—it is a calm that comes after radical acceptance, of letting things be, of realizing that I will continue to experience disappointment and sorrow if I place my hopes and dreams on other people. This doesn't always make the long nights any shorter, and I still experience bouts of depression--but I've found that the depression and nights are tolerable because I have come to expect it now, and I know that eventually, these feelings and darkness will pass.