Tales of an Outsider
I am an outsider in my office. I’ve only lived in Texas a year, I am working a job intended for someone younger than me (about 15 years younger), and the people who are my age are employees fully invested in the pathetic drama that comes from working for a public academic institution.
A lot of politics, a lot of red tape, a lot of bullshit that I don’t care about. If you include the complications of my personal status as a divorcee, and it gets complicated. Granted, that tidbit alone means I have more in common with half the office, since less than half of them are married at this time, but then I am back to the first situation, being a student/employee, and I am thrust back to the outer orbits of the inter-office dynamics.
If I didn’t know better, I would say that I intimidate the people in the office (aside from my immediate supervisor). Something about the daunting combination of my age, the age of my children, my previous marital status and then my current status as in between careers/in the midst of major life changes, seems to keep people away from me.
I don’t get invited to hang out. I don’t get follow-up calls to hit the town on the weekend despite the promises that they will happen. I come off as friendly, and smart. At least that’s what they tell me.
Maybe it’s because I don’t have anything good to share? I don’t spend a lot of time talking about myself, especially since much of my personal history is just so fucking depressing.
Who the hell wants to hear about how I had to divorce the father of my children after almost 15 years? Or that he was a such a dick I had to move halfway across the country to get away from his toxic influence?
Or that I am almost 40 starting my life over again because I wasted my adulthood devoted to raising a family that doesn’t exist anymore?
I’m the veritable life of the party. Who wouldn’t want to hear about that?!
Oh yeah, I know: NOBODY. Fuck. Even I don’t want to hear about it.
Nobody wants to hang out with the person going through a divorce.
It’s been a year and I haven’t really connected with anyone, not close enough to fill the void created when I moved 1400 miles away from the friends I had made during the eight years I lived in Virginia. I haven’t been actively casting my nets, but I haven’t been unaware of the people I’ve met.
My situation is so unique, I feel like Captain America in the Winter Soldier (man, I LOVE that movie…) when he said “Believe it or not…it’s kind of hard to find somebody with shared life experience”. I totally understand where he is coming from. It’s not just about a random hookup. Who the hell has time for all that? I’m not interested in games. And therein lies the crux of the matter.
I was giving this some serious thought recently. Until I am in a situation where I am in contact with people my age, and until I have transitioned out of this college environment where the majority of people I meet are MUCH younger than me, and surrounded by people my age, but who are happy in their rut and have ceased reaching for more, I am not going to meet people I am going to want to get to know. I am not the sort of person who cultivates relationships lightly. I prefer quality over quantity, and the friends I make, I maintain.
Sure, much of the distance I feel is self-imposed, I’m not good at dealing with my emotions — I am not even sure I have processed what happened to the one relationship I thought would last forever. It hardly seems fair to subject other people to my damage.
I worry though that this is all that will ever be. I worry that this transitional state I feel I am in is never going to end, and in turn, go beyond me to affect the lives of my teenage children in some way that I can’t even begin to understand or anticipate.
