Right now, I feel surrounded by labels. And nothing feels right. My once favorite songs sound like noise in my ears, my favorite foods like dirt in my mouth.
I never knew the weight of success would be as heavy as failure. That working my ass off and making it would be as hard as shutting down.
I'm in between. Between everything. Between rock bottom and the top. Between being known and being completely unknown.
Between living and dying.
They say the first year of business is the hardest. But typically they are referring to the lack of cash flow, the long hours and no pay. I have pay, I have cash flow. And while the long hours do suck, they really aren't the worst of it.
It's the unknown.
It's the feeling completely alone while still being surrounded by people. It's having a cheering section, but it feels like they're on the other side of the stadium.
It's being so stressed that even drinking water upsets my stomach. And watching my husband's hairline recede at an alarming pace and know that it's pretty much all my fault. It's having friends tell me 'you rock,' but have them get their desserts elsewhere. And me too scared to ask them why.
And all the while, I feel like an outsider because I don't have a child.
I know I made this decision. And I have no regrets about it. Now they're saying there's a "mommy gene," and it seems I might not have been born with it. But to garishly quote Kumar, "Just because you're hung like a moose doesn't mean you gotta to do porn." Whether I have the mommy gene or not, it's just not something that's in my future. And while I'm ok with what that immediately means, it also means that I am excluded from a club. The Mommy Club.
Because I've already had enough of a hard time being excluded from the White Dude Club. It's no secret that women have a hard enough time getting around and now, I'm immediately excluded from another large chunk because I didn't procreate. Hell, I can't even hang out in the Single Girls Club because I went off and got married. So who do I have? Married ladies with careers but no kids, raise your hands!
*crickets* I personally know of one other woman whom I speak with who falls into this category.
Not that I have any time to hang out with them. I work 60+ hours a week. So unless you want to come hang out on my couch Sunday afternoons, I've got nothing.
The sucky part about all of this is knowing that every single portion of this is my fault. These are all my decisions. My choices. Things that I have actively chosen to do.
And I want to whine about it.
Whining sounds like some indulgent thing that white girls get to do. Maybe what I'm doing isn't whining. Maybe it's more like crying. Crying for help. Which feels overdramatic, but I deep down, I know it's not. I feel left out. I've talked about this over and over because, well, I'm not over it. I feel rejected generally and specifically. Today I saw an event that was about food and invited women to join. When I looked closer, it was specifically targeted toward moms- not women. Since I'm not responsible for feeding my offspring (just hundreds of people in the state), I'm not actually welcome.
And that sucks.
And for the record, I was not Prom Queen. If you didn't catch it, that was a quote from Can't Hardly Wait.
