CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

June 16_Personal Analyses

A little change of Blogging Scenery today, a different view from the train-coming out of the tunnel of environmental despair for a few moments, though I never stop thinking and worrying about apocalyptic ecological collapse. I've been going through some strenuous personal issues (as the old Miles Davis song put it, “My mind keeps goin' thru them changes”) and the last 13 days have been emotionally horrendous. I had a shorter spell of this in May, about 4-5 days; this one started June 4 and has just rolled on like a French Revolution Juggernaut. I alternate between terrified anxiety about apocalyptic environmental collapse-or as I call it “the end of civilization as we know it”-anger, depression, despair, emotional numbness-you get it. Most of the time I don't feel like myself, but still I don't know whom I do feel like. So it's been difficult.





         Part of this I think is occasioned by the 40th anniversary reunion of my high school class this past weekend. No, of course, I didn't go: I live 4 states away and no way to go. But two weeks before that I opened a new Facebook account in my at-that-time name and started trying to locate classmates. It's been good and bad: some ignored my friends request; Sunday one from my class claimed not to know me at all. Others were pleased to find me. I reconnected with one close friend I had not been in contact with since 1984.





         But yesterday morning I was asked into chat by a man from my high school graduating class, on whom I had had quite a crush then. He had married, fathered four, and is now unfortunately widowed. I don't know the background to that. He lives several states away, had never to my recollection spoken to me in high school nor even knew of my existence. So, no, Gentle Readers and those with particularly romantic hearts: this is NOT going to be a “childhood sweethearts and old flames reconnect” story. But he did ask to speak to me yesterday and we had a 3-hour chat, which left me feeling more than miserable. Many old issues were awakened and I ended feeling as if my O-ring (remember the Challenger explosion) had broken, or the iron rod at my core (think nuclear reactor) was skewed and cracked. Then  later in the evening I began to back away from the conversation and to analyze it, and I realized that I would never have tolerated the direction of the conversation if someone-a complete stranger-had come to me online and started this-nor would I have in person, I would simply have walked away, or if online, closed out the chat window. But because it was somebody from high school, whom I had “admired” at the time, and because it was flattering, I let it to go. And I was a fool to do so!





         I was foolish because I allowed somebody else's issues to color my own perception of myself. Just because I am “different” from another does not make me automatically wrong, or less, or inferior, or skewed; just because I once found someone “crushworthy” does not make that person a worthy individual now: that comes from character and integrity, not flattery nor inappropriate conversation. And that is what I have learned.