Only Child

So, it's one o'clock in the morning. I'm probably going to regret this post in the morning, but right now, I'm feeling bold and thoughtful and I've lost my filter. I'm dealing with a lot right now. I've been needing to roll things over ... chat with a friend ... cry a lot. SOMETHING! But nothing's working. Probably because I can't go it alone. But somehow, that's my only option. Garbage from my past and present are swirling around me and I'm left trying to figure out how to cope. I think I've been dealt a sort of "coping handicap" if you will. I've always seen myself as slightly disadvantaged to the rest of the world. I'm an only child. Only children don't understand a lot of things. I'm missing connection, communication, convention. Isolated and confused, longing for someone-something to connect, to support ...

The following excerpts are pieces I've highlighted from a book called Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. I bought this book at my favorite little book store in Jackson Hole. I underlined and annotated the whole thing as I read. I've never been able to put all of these thoughts and feelings into words. But these authors did. If I was more eloquent, this is what I would have said. While I'm filterless, I need to purge these thoughts from other people's perspectives to express my own, because for some reason, I can't get my own grasp on any of this. Here's my excuse:

...the bitter voice that can still pops in my head when I watch my friends or husband bantering easily with their siblings, the voice that wants to know, Why not me? I loathe that voice, drenched as it is with envy and self-pity. It cuts me off from people, roadblocks conversation and connection, and returns me, fittingly, to the very state of ancient loneliness I'm always trying to get away from.

...constant longing I remember plaguing me as a kid.

I was searching for some mysterious, lasting attachement--a substitute for the sibling bond I never had and the romantic relationship I had yet to have.

... attempts to turn their friends into family left them hurt, disappointed, and bereft.

How can you gauge the depth with which the people we love and live with leave their traces in you ... that's all we're searching for ... longing for human connection ...

It's an impossible task to know if you are the way you are because you are without siblings.

I have close friendships, but sometimes I'm too demanding. I give a lot to my friends, but I want a lot back. I want love from them and often I get only like.

Friends usually have siblings--or children, not to mention parents and/or husbands. All of those people understandably come first.

... some kind of something that he didn't quite know how to satisfy ...

I mind it very much. I want a witness--or better, two, three--to what I remember, a person or persons to whom I could turn and ask, "Remember that Christmas, the one when Mom ..."

No one to confirm or deny. No other perspective but my own.

I clung to my girlfriends. I was always crossing some unspoken line with them, too, entering into relationships that were too close, too intimate ... I ... held on tight. Too tight. I didn't have any way to measure the distance between us, no real sister at home to provide an accurate gauge of the precise increments between friend and family. As a result, there was an odd friction in the relationships, and unspoken tension about how close we should be. I wanted something permanent, forever. They had that with their siblings at home.

I was always on the lookout for extra siblings. Substitutions were all there were.

I was always poised on the edge of chairs, the corners of rooms, the smallest space, so no one would find me asking too much.