shit person

O has recently taken to calling someone he thinks is a jerk a shit person. i'm not sure how to tell him his mom is one too. 

or has been. i have been a shit person. i have had affairs. i have lied. i have been a coward. i have disappeared. being a shit person might just be in me. it's not like i don't try - haven't tried - to not be a shit person. but i have been nonetheless. 

i'm sorry to everyone i have ever been a shit person to. i'm sorry for not knowing how to make things better, for not apologizing, or coming clean, or explaining why. for not being better. 

it's funny, realizing again and again how you haven't measured up to your own standards, let along somebody else's. i used to feel guilty about this. i guess part of me still does. but guilt doesn't really do anything except make you feel even shittier and in some ways feel like you're doing penance for the shit you did to become a shit person in the first place. so i've tried to make that feeling of guilt a signpost. don't do it again. remember this feeling and how it sucks and don't do it again. 

the problem i have now is that sometimes not repeating the same mistakes makes me feel like a shit person in other ways. like i haven't responded to someone else's needs or fallen short of their expectations of me. like i don't know how to continue in a relationship - friendship, acquaintanceship, whatever - once i feel that. 

i went back to the enneagram yesterday to see what it had to say. in reading over this blog - all the things i had forgotten about - i saw that i had once done the enneagram and landed on a 4. this time, i got a 2 or a 5. which is funny because they're different types entirely. heart vs head. 

without making excuses, this seems to be the crux of my shittiness - being caught between my heart and my head and not knowing how to find the middle ground. or maybe looking for a middle ground in the first place is the problem. maybe it's about commitment to one or the other. 

or maybe i'm just a shit person. 

if 8 years pass in an echo chamber, does anybody hear?

in a moment of wondering, i typed in the address of this old blog, thinking that by now, with years of inactivity, it must have been gobbled up by the ether. but lo! here it is. i skimmed it, thinking of course, that i sound(ed) like a broken record. wondering who all the characters in these plays were, way back then. what friend? who did that? huh. interesting. 

i remember most of the moments i wrote about here. but what is also striking is the torrent of life that has passed between bouts of writing. the thrash and roll of every little thing that hasn't been spoken - that resides in fading and faltering memories, most of which i haven't bothered to record.

but this blog had its first foray into the world nearly twenty years ago now, which seems bizarre to me, and unlikely. how much has changed and how much the same? if every cell in a body is replaced every 7 years, then we are a whole new world almost three times over, and everything that is now is an echo of what came before. the burn of a long dead star in the night sky. 

i am tempted, as i clearly have always been, to make a crack about my absence, and fix this post into a moment - write as if i will keep on writing, as if someone is reading, as if this post is real, as if we are, as if permanence can be penned. 

but i won't (or i won't go on about it at any rate). what i have been thinking about lately is aging. i am 51, battling the vague symptoms of menopause, reading with amusement and relation the struggles of my peers, as this generation of women - my generation - is perhaps the first to get so successful as to feel their experience relevant and so actually writes about it. brain fog, bloating, insomnia, skin conditions. aging pretty much blows. and yet, as they say, the alternative is worse. 

i wrote maybe fifteen years ago about hitting up against the spectre of my potential and feeling like perhaps the time had passed to gestate into anything. yep. still applies. apparently, you can run down half a century and still be dogged by the thing in your brain that makes you feel like you haven't measured up. and god, i KNOW i haven't. i was supposed to be someone (cue laughter) but now what i am is a greying asian queerdo whose most important contribution to the world is a brilliantly flamboyant thirteen-year old.

sometimes i look in the mirror and have a conversation with the person looking back at me. this is enough, i say. is it, she says back to me, familiar eyes asking those ridiculously hard questions. it is, i say. it has to be. because this game is almost over. 

i mean, she agrees, i know. she has to. she's me. and i look at o - his young mind tracing out his future paths, figuring out how to be in the world, still holding on to my hand, but less now than before - and i know i've done good. he's a good kid. he will be a good citizen, which in true diasporic fashion, is nearly all i've ever hoped for. and i don't know if it's enough. but it's something. 

perhaps this last section of life will bring something new, some other way to face down that old phantom. but if it doesn't, then i think i'm okay with that. at least for today.