Quitter

My parents used to call me a quitter.

• After a year or so of Campfire Girls, I didn't go back. It wasn't any fun and I have some very bad memories of it.
• I was in Honor Choir in 5th grade and I quit it to play softball. Because our lives revolved around my brother's sports, I thought I'd get some of the attention if I played a sport. (There is a whole, ugly story around this, but now isn't the time.) I wish I hadn't done this. I'd have been happier in Choir. But I was only 10 or 11.
• In 6th grade, I joined Girl Scouts. After about five months, all we had done were a handful of crafts. We didn't go anywhere or do anything. I had joined with two other girls, and they were also bored and unhappy. They made me the spokesman to tell the leader we were quitting. She cried. I was 11. My folk began calling me a quitter to my face.
• I was forced to join Job's Daughters when I was in 7th grade. Didn't want to, but the family had promised my dying grandfather (and given several things, I certainly felt no compulsion to follow that promise). I stayed for a year and a half before being able to leave it. My parents again accused me of quitting, of never being able to stick with a thing.

I never understood how they could want me to stick for life with something that I was doing as a kid. I think I stuck as well as anyone else my age did, unless you found what you loved. I would have stuck with music lessons, but they always found reasons why I couldn't have those.

Maybe I don't have what it takes to stick. I've never had a boyfriend longer than 3 years (and that was the abusive one). Never been married. I've broken up with the guy more than half the time (quitter or really poor judgement?). I've held most of my jobs for two years or less. Of course, part of that came from working during the dot-com craziness in Seattle and working as a contractor or for a company that lived for less than a couple of years. I have worked two long jobs: one for six years and one for over five.

I have given up some friends, friends who I found to be either untrustworthy or unstable or just plain sucking the energy from me when I spent time with them. I don't think I ask too much from a friend, but I've been yelled at and accused of being childish by two women I'd thought were my friends here. Reality checks with other friends suggest that it was the other women who had some issues.

I think that after my Dad, and then my brother some years later, died, I realized how temporary everything is. Also how much pain there is in life and in losing someone or being cast aside by someone.

This feeling of temporality affects everything, from me never fully unpacking to feeling that life always has an exit door.

People who feel completely invested in life and living have things they feel make life worth it: love, family, passion for something they do, religion, whatever. I want to feel connected, I truly do. I do feel a molecular-level connection with everything and everyone --- we're all just pieces of the Universe. And I feel an emotional connection with trees, babies, and cats, a connection that feels two-way.  I'm not very good with connections with people and never have been. It seems to be growing worse with age. I guess once you've missed one of those foundation building blocks in your formative years, you never can learn it later. I tend to watch wistfully as other people make connections that carry outside of the workplace or school or whatever.

I don't feel invested. I've tried. I work with a volunteer organization that I care about. I have some online friends and some long-distance friends. But it's all distant. I have no partner, no close friends, no pets, to cause me to feel invested and connected and tethered to life. For me, life feels much more temporary than it does for most people. Life feels far away.

I know what I want and I know I have no power to get what I want. And I am very tired of depending on a random universe to give me what I want. I don't see any Life Lesson that any Cosmic Spirit would be teaching me that continually separated my connections to others and to my life. Doesn't really make sense.

My life looks ugly to me, uglier than it ever has previously. I look ugly on the inside: twisted, starved, atrophied, dark. 

I can't (and don't really) blame other people for not being my friends/family/lover/husband. To solve a problem, you must look at the one thing all aspects have in common. That thing would be me. I'm the reason my life is one I don't love, don't much like. I'm the reason I don't have what I want. Well, that and chance. I might as well surrender to these facts, and the one where I have no power to change any of this.

What does that leave me? Myself. Where does that leave me? Floating through life, connected by a thread.

I hope that there is some universe parallel to ours where my mom and dad and brother and I are all alive and healthy and happy, getting through life together with love and support. That would at least help balance out this life I have.

I don't consider it quitting if you give something a full chance, if you explore it the best you can and still, you don't like it or it doesn't fit. It's not quitting because all things end.