Happy Fun Cog

I wonder if the reason I'm so uptight about everything (well, most things) is that I realize on some level that if I weren't so uptight, if I relaxed a bit, I would realize that most of the things that I worry about are things that aren't worth worrying about in the large scheme of things. This realization, at least if it was something I realized on a regular basis until it became a foundational truth in my day-to-day life, would be problematic because I use anxiety and worry to help structure the way I look at the world.

I think this started back when I was an adolescent. When I was around 12 or 13 years old, I came to an intellectual conclusion about the nature of the world that I was not emotionally prepared to handle. It was an atheistic point of view in which I saw the world that I knew as nothing more than a molecule on a big rock spheroid that circled around a sun in a black void. While I don't consider myself an atheist right now, I'd say that I came to a lot of strong conclusions about life and death at a time when I was not emotionally developed. The way I lived my life, shaped by my family dynamic, was as a child. To deal with certain elements of my life, I wasn't pushing boundaries like a normal adolescent. I retreated from those boundaries, seeking solace in a simplistic view of dynamics that were making my family life unpleasant.

So, in the face of this powerful and bleak vision of life and death, I sought artificial structure, a way to keep myself from thinking about Big Topics. These day, that artificial structure manifests itself in me getting angry about little things. That's not to say that I don't have big things to worry about. I may soon be out of a job as my company is in the midst of an attempted hostile takeover by another company. But this situation is not as dangerous for me as it is for some people, given the fact that I don't have children, a mortgage, a serious medical condition, or heavy debt. What I DO have is a good skill set and parents who could help me financially if things didn't work out.

Yet I continue to worry instead of tackling Big Issues. And I do this because I'm afraid of what will happen if I think about these issues. What if I realize that the way I've been living my life is total BS and I need to be out there pushing boundaries? What if I realize that, all things considered, the best thing I could do not only for myself but for everyone else is devote myself to the political and social causes that I feel must move in a certain general direction if our civilization is to survive (i.e. environmental concerns, etc.)?

I don't know if I'm ready to handle any of that stuff yet. So, instead, I worry about the little things.

While I'm looking forward to moving to a different apartment next year, mostly to get away from the noise and mild sluminess of my current location, I saw something today that reminded me of the charms of my current location.

I live in a town that has, to put it mildly, seen better days. Situated about 20 miles outside of Boston, it used to be a mill town and a railway hub. Now, it's a husk of its former self. The downtown area is dominated by a homeless shelter and long string of small shops that survive but don't thrive. Most of the houses in the area, including mine, are ramshackle triple-deckers (for you non-New Englanders, 'triple-deckers' refers to three-storied houses that were built in the 40's or 50's as multi-family apartments).

One chunk of downtown close to where I live is mostly vacant. It has a shopping center that's completely shuttered except for a Dunkin' Donuts and a charity thrift store, as well as several old factory buildings along the trail line that aren't quite abandoned but have been sectioned off into small, low-overhead businesses.

It's a grim place. It's not a slum, but it's ugly and struggling.

I was returning from a long walk when I looked across the road at a house I'd passed dozens of times without really noticing. The hedges around the house are large, probably 10-12 feet high. Tall hedges are common on my street because it's a state route and heavily trafficked. But these hedges were double the normal size and I was surprised I'd never noticed that before.

As I walked past, I saw an older couple in the driveway. The man looked like he was in his late 60's and the woman was a little younger. The man had a large fleshy face and dark skin and was dressed in suit pants, suspenders, and a dress shirt. Those suspenders were very, very necessary as the man had the large, overhanging stomach of someone who had spent many years enjoying rich food. He was looking down at a little green sports car, something like an Aston Martin. The car, like the man, was old and had seen better days. The hood was popped open and the man was looking vaguely at the innards.

The woman was holding and cooing at a small child. I couldn't see much of her but I assumed she was the baby's grandmother. She had thick black hair that was falling across her face. I think that both she and the man were of Mediterranean descent, which is not surprising given that this area used to be composed of mostly Italian and Portuguese immigrants.

I imagined them as a couple who had lived in that house for decades. I imagined that they raised their family there back when the neighborhood was, well, a neighborhood, where people knew each other and raised their families, as opposed to a collection of houses rented out to strangers who tried to find some way of blocking out the traffic and the declining town that surrounded them. I imagined that the child was their grandchild and that, with the woman looking at the child and the man at the old sports car, that they were a couple looking at the past and the future. I wish them the best.

An odd thing has happened at work. Someone in my group has been sending me... subtle? passive aggressive? messages to be happy. There are six of us in my group, and we sit in a saltine tray of cubes, two stacks of three cubes in one section of a large room in an anonymous office. Actually, I guess that's more of a cookie tray arrangement than a saltine tray. But I like crackers better than cookies. And it's apropos of this post to note as such, that I lean towards the salty instead of the sweet.

I must confess to an inaccuracy - there are actually 8 people in my group, but two of them are in New Jersey so I think I can rule them out. Those two I've worked with, or in some proximity to (in a non-geographic way) for 8 years. The people that actually sit in my section make up an amalgamation of acquaintance, one being a co-worker for 7 years and another for less than 7 months.

The first such message wasn't clearly a message, though I suspected it was at the time. A generic foam squeeze ball was in my cube when I came in one morning. The ball is yellow and has a happy face on it. Given the complete lack of other occurrences of foam spheroids randomly appearing in my cube, I theorized that it had been put there deliberately by somebody. Having the self-awareness to recognize that I prefer saltines to cookies, that I prefer eating lunch alone to socializing, I picked the ball up off the floor and set it on my desk as a sort of symbolic acceptance though I don't necessarily trust someone who puts smiley-face squeeze balls in cubicles as a method of communication to grasp any level of symbolism. Mmm... crackers!

The second message was much more explicit. When I returned to the office from vacation, I found a fortune from a fortune cookie on my computer keyboard, with a piece of junk mail (that I'd left in my mailbox for weeks) used as a paperweight to keep it there. The fortune was that old favorite inspirational saying, "Dance like nobody's watching."

Truth be told, I'm a bit ambivalent about the messages. Their passive nature bothers me and the idea that it's probably representative of a group effort/thought process (as opposed to solely the work of an individual) bothers me; it makes me feel ganged up on, persecuted. However, given that I've had a persecution complex in the past, I don't put too much emotional stock in this interpretation.

I am, to a certain extent, flattered by the notes. I've always done my best to keep my co-workers at arm's length, either because they irritated the shit out of me and I didn't want my frustration to boil over or because humanity as a whole irritated the shit out of me and I could only find peace through distance. These attitudes have mellowed a bit over the past year, I think, due to a number of factors: 1) my relationship with my girlfriend, which is within approximately a week or so of its first anniversary, 2) my decision to quit drinking and focus on mental and physical health, and 3) psychotherapy (though it should be noted that the psychotherapy has been going for close to 10 years so it's not like it suddenly became effective on its own).

The problem is that as much as I, as a whole, want to be more friendly with people and see the benefit in socializing more with my workmates, I have little in common with them. I find casual conversation to be painful, or at the very least dull. I'm a bit of a snob, I'll admit that up front. I'm more intellectually engaged than my workmates. Not intellectually superior to them, necessarily, but more engaged with current events, with reading, etc.

I'm also afraid to let the distance between us decrease. I have a hard time balancing this fact with the fact that my post-college life, all 10+ years of it, has been defined (more subconsciously than consciously) by a feeling of tremendous loneliness.

An aside: I've recently come to understand one of the problems I have with writing blog posts consistently, even though I often feel the instinct to do so when something new or interesting happens in my life. The problem with blog posts is that, in my mind, they should have a clear beginning, middle, and ending. And if I haven't arrived at a conclusion about something, I don't want to write about it. Or perhaps the urge to avoid writing about something is especially strong when, in fact, I know what the conclusion would be if I followed through my thought process.

The conclusion in this case is that I feel very strongly that at least one person, more likely multiple people, in my group are reaching out to me. They're seeing that I'm more positive and friendly recently than I've been in a long time, perhaps ever, and this is their way of saying, "Keep going." But I'm afraid of losing control. I'm afraid of what happens when I allow myself to get close to people. I see the same thing in my relationship with my parents and my girlfriend. I don't want to confront my mixed feelings about people or, worse yet, express myself emotionally towards them. So instead I maintain emotional distance. The ideal, as I've told myself for a long time, is to have friends, to feel close to people. But now that I have that chance, in all areas of my life (work, family, friends, tae kwon do), there's a part of me that doesn't want to let go of the isolation. It's what I know. It makes me feel safe.