The unbearable heaviness of wasting my life

I just returned from taking down the panels for the art show and they must have weighed a hundred pounds. I was paid generously and despite the sore muscles that I acquired it was worth it for the experience and getting to do something helpful with others that I had a good time working with… but right now I am tired and it is hard to cone up with the words.

I feel sad today, these moments of feeling maybe kind of crushed but being too tired to figure out exactly why. Part if it is the thought that I could have dedicated myself to studying languages and everything years ago and I just feel like I wasted my whole life. I kept thinking about this German girl I met in Galway years ago. She was really cool, and her friend was too, and I can’t believe they complimented my German even when it was so bad. But I was already without a foundation in my life and then I started exploring gender identity which made me feel more insecure than ever. I wish I had been able to give myself advice back then; it is nice that I tried to be true to myself but I wish I could go back and tell myself it is not worth it to suffer with a sense of exponentially more misunderstanding and alienation than I had experienced before. If I had a small circle of constant friends I felt safe with that would be one thing but I did not and I just kept making things harder on myself, creating more and more ways that others might misunderstand me. This German girl in Galway was maybe the first time I really wanted to get to know someone but… I had to hide… I did not even respond to her request for photos of our experiences together because… something about exploring gender identity without support made me ashamed, and it was hard enough to talk to cute people before I made it harder for most people to have any idea what to do with me. I feel like so many decisions I made in so many ways make me sad because I can’t see it as anything but wasting my life. The connections I could have had, if only I had a slightly different perspective on things.

Or could I have? Maybe there was always going to be way too much weight on my mind for me to make connections with others but I consider connections not made (and really it was the polar opposite of making connections, feeling so much pressure that I just wanted to repel the whole world and see who might be left) a form of wasting my life. I can’t even begin to figure out what my faults or follies or oversights or misconceptions were such that I did not grab my life by the horn and seize the day. It is hard to recognise that I have not lived in any way I would like to remember if I were to die, but then, was there ever any way for me to live a good life that would have made me happy to live it, was there any way for me to chill out and make deep connections, or was something always going to get in my way, of everything I always dreamed I could be? At the very least that is someone who lives life and makes the most of my life instead of wasting it and right now I feel that all I have done is waste it. And I’ll be leaving soon, of course, as always, so this growing sense of having some kind of community won’t last…

Other things were making me sad this morning, too, but I can’t think of what they were. Oh, the fact that I have seen many of the same people Sunday after Sunday since August and I looked around the room and felt connected to every one of them. There is a moment that people stop feeling like scary strangers and I don’t really know and start to feel like a community I am a part of too, where I feel more and more safe sharing my real thoughts and feelings. I see familiar faces that made me happy that not so long ago might have intimidated me because I had no idea who they were and I had been so vulnerable. This community has done for me what I wish other communities had done for me and I feel grateful and so much better now in some ways. I can’t help but feel like if I only had a friend around to understand me or a community that had my back years of certain sorts of suffering could have prevented and my life would have turned out completely differently. I don’t even know how to make sense of it.

Why did I spend so much time under causes and conditions that led to such constriction and suffering, that kept me from connecting with people, that kept me from living in ways that I would consider meaningful? I don’t know how to deal with what I feel I have lost, in not getting what I seem to maybe get now a very long time ago. I am still restless and aadly I’m probably going to keep feeling like I am still wasting my life but it is like I look back on my life as though at the end of it all and… being homest with myself, this is not the way I would have liked to have lived it, but I don’t know if the causes and conditions to just be okay and live to the fullest were even available to me. I don’t know. I feel like I did something very wrong in wasting my life in despair and a sense of being trapped and why couldn’t I have been more like Else? That was suggested to me today as a sort of joke. Let it go. I want to grieve about how much I have missed out on but I do not know what that is and I don’t know what if anything it would take if, like Lola in Run Lola Run, I got a certain number of do overs to potentially make everything right. Yeah, if I could go back and live my life now, I think I know how to live it at least a whole lot better than I did before, but maybe the fear and suffering have just been so great and there was never any getting out of this labyrinth. I did not manage to figure out how to live meaningfully despite desiring to live meaningfully more than just about anything and that hurts. If I were to change the course of my life, maybe I would start with this Galway girl, whose name I do not remember, but who made me feel safe and at home in a time and place I never thought I would feel that way again. Maybe I’d start by just sending her the photos. Thinking of her makes me think, maybe I didn’t have to run endlessly away from connection after all? Why did I run away from living, anyway? I wanted to show people I hoped would care about me all I was up against and how impossible things were for me and it backfired. I wish I had connected but I wish I had been more discerning around who I was going to let affect my emotions and my heart. I sish I had believed in myself more but I didn’t and now I have wasted the most precious thing.

What happened to me? What is my life and how do I know I’m living it? I feel like I am learning what I wish I had learned when all this started, and I am way too much if a late bloomer perhaps to do anything but regret. My life maybe could have been so different. I don’t know how or why, but I feel as one on their deathbed recalling their regrets, and mine feel too many to count. I tried to get out if my way but couldn’t; and if it was just meant to take as long as it takes to figure out how to make the most of life, how do I not consider all that time wasted, how do I ever believe that I am where I am at when I am for a reason? Do things happen for a reason? Will someone appear who I never imagined would be in my life who can help me understand that there either has or has not been a point to all of this? Can someone help me put into persoective how much I have wasted my life? Have I ever been a contribution to anybody’s life? What kind  of contribution do I need to make to feel like mine is a life not wasted? Will anyone ever get through to me behind these walls? After all of this, will I ever just melt, and be okay?