(This began as a rant about being labelled a ``scholar'' and being the only non-PhD holder among a group and feeling all left out, but on second thought that is too damn inane a topic to talk about. I don't want to be thought of as being a massive whiner.)
Life ain't shabby. I'm alive, I have a job, I have some semblence of free time, I get to do things I like doing and things I love doing. Yet somehow there is an emptiness within me. It generally doesn't show itself though---I have enough interesting activities to keep things moving that I never feel bored or discomforted. Until of course when I stop to examine myself with respect to the world around me.
I realise that each year, I'm losing one more friend than I had. Sometimes I blame them, but most times I blame myself. There are many instances where I just... don't want to be involved with the people any more. It's not that they had done something untoward to me, it is more like their trajectory in life creates situations that I feel uncomfortable about. No, scratch that, I'm used to being uncomfortable. What I mean is that their trajectory in life makes me feel inferior in all manners of the word.
What I'm talking about is things like: being in the presence of peers who are all PhD holders who talk about nothing but their research using the latest buzzwords, married folks who yap non-stop about their children and all the related jazz, and people who have no fucking clue how to talk with me so they uncomfortably try to blend in and make it all awkward.
I basically leave the first two groups of people out of my life as much as I can, unless forced to deal with them, where I just quietly assume my nondescript position and only open my bloody mouth when I have to. The third group of people, I keep losing at the rate of one per year, and I'm not even sure what to make of that.
I was converting bits and pieces of my autobiography (only up to thirteen years old, unfortunately---some things had been too traumatic to revisit thus far) from the old MSWord document that I started when I was twenty into LaTeX recently when I unconsciously did some analysis on my life, looking for some of the fractal-like patterns in it. And funny enough, some patterns did occur, and even though their form evolved over time, the crucial aspects never did.
The ``me'' within is a different animal from the ``me'' without.
What I mean is, as a person interacting with the world, I have built many walls surrounding the psyche that is the real me. Everyone saw the walls I built, some more clued in than others, and most respected those walls. Only a few managed to breach them and access the me within, either through my own weak moments or through the more inane manner of a lasting friendship. There were periods where I tried to be friendlier and take down some of the walls and barriers thus erected, but they have usually ended up with me being hurt psychologically, which meant that the walls and barriers were up almost as quickly as I tried to keep them down.
Nowadays, as a rule of thumb, the walls are always up, never down. That can explain the misadventure with Janet---it was hard reaching out to her when both of us where having our own versions of the walls up. It was a shame really, I always thought we could have been successful. Maybe there's still a chance, but I'm not hopeful any more.
Sometimes though, I wonder just how deep my friends know me. Considering the amount of resistance I unconciously project through all the walls, it's something that is hard to tell. It's not even a case of keeping secrets---everyone has those---but rather, a segregation of personae. I know how the real me is like, he's complex, dark, wild, but fundamentally non-evil in nature. But the me without is more mundane, serious-looking, and probably very tiresome and boring.
Living this upcoming decade feels very similar to living during the first twelve years of my formal education---everyone around me is mainstream and ignores me in general, while I bury myself among creative endeavours and read a ton of books both fiction and non-fiction, not all of them related to a single specific theme of inquiry. Sadly, given my experience during that duodecennial period, I think I'm not hopeful at how things will turn out now.
To end off, I'll leave behind this: look for Dustin Hoffman's interview on his role in Tootsie.
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