when i was young, each birthday took on some sort of mythic importance, mainly to do with numbers.
each year, with each new number that i became, i'm 5--i'm 7--i'm 9, i made an in depth analysis of what that number was, its color, its smell, its sound. i thought, for no good reason, that the number would inform the year.
it was the same time that i realized that words also have their own shape, smell and color.
i remember that the switch from single digit to double digit numbers represented a huge change in my life. the introduction of the second number created all sorts of complications for my yearly analysis and calculation.
if i had the kind of math brain i wish i did, i am sure i could have worked out fractals and tessellations to coincide with the event, but i do not and besides that, i was ten.
i only bring this up because last night i thought a long time about the fact that birthdays mean very little to me anymore, numbers or otherwise. and the next great change from double digit to triple i'll never see.
or at least i hope i'll never see. this life can be wonderful, but i will take my short time here and be happy when it's over.
i thought a lot, too, about how comfortable i was with abstractions at a young age, how my thinking has changed, my (periodic) discomfort with abstractions now, and how much more comfortable i was then with the amount of time i spent living inside my own head.
i reflected on how living in my own head now is seen as a liability, that being engaged in my own interests is somehow a frustration to others.
that i am supposed to feel badly about this.
when i was small, no one seemed to be bothered by the fact that i was a somewhat spacey, very serious, very sensitive girl who lived a large part of her life in her own head, asking questions, figuring things out, recognizing relationships between phenomena, cataloguing to create a kind of tapestry of information that i used to work within the world outside my head.
but now that i am a somewhat spacey, very serious, very sensitive woman, it doesn't feel like that anymore.
and i haven't changed. i think that's just how i am. no matter how much i love the people i love, and no matter how much i want to be loved by others and share myself with them, i'll always be like that.
it is, i think, part of the inexorable isolation of human consciousness. or, at least, how it expressses itself in me.
i don't know what to do about it, if anything.
i just know that the whole thing, the loneliness of it (which i experienced when i was a young girl, too) and now the lack of autonomy i feel over it--the fact that i even have to think about it at all--makes me incredibly sad.
