I've always wondered how that desperate need for proof of identity, the need for mirrors and meanings to prove that I exist, could be mistaken for arrogance or selfish self-absorbption. Who else would pay attention to these things, or listen? What else can I do but cling to existence? Should I not look for reflections of my meaning in the world? Is it so arrogant and selfish merely to want to exist?
"The trouble with you is, you think too much about yourself."
Why do the people who say things like that always assume our thoughts are pleasant and ego-feeding? Is searching for proof of existence really so egomaniacal? Maybe it seems that way, to people who have never thought to doubt their own reality. I've never understood it.
Whree years old I got up in the middle of the night and walked over to the stairs, and through the stairwell I could hear my parents talking in the living room, and they were talking about me. "Is she asleep?" "Yes."
It was the first time I felt so nonexistent, invisible, unreal, as if I could drift down the stairs and they would still talk about me in the third person as if I wasn't there and didn't exist. And if they stopped talking about me, perhaps I wouldn't exist at all.
Strange how some of us solitary and only children are so starved for attention when people say that only-children must be spoiled. An ex-roommate recently blamed what she saw as my inability to share space with others as being due to my spoiled only-child upbringing; I saw it as a desire to have other people respect my space, my property, and my existence, and that even invisible people that don't matter shouldn't have to keep their shampoo in their bedroom behind a stack of books to keep the roommates from using it all.
(forgive the late-night babbling; your words seem to have sparked something in me.)
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Date: 2003-06-23 10:31 pm (UTC)"The trouble with you is, you think too much about yourself."
Why do the people who say things like that always assume our thoughts are pleasant and ego-feeding? Is searching for proof of existence really so egomaniacal? Maybe it seems that way, to people who have never thought to doubt their own reality. I've never understood it.
Whree years old I got up in the middle of the night and walked over to the stairs, and through the stairwell I could hear my parents talking in the living room, and they were talking about me.
"Is she asleep?"
"Yes."
It was the first time I felt so nonexistent, invisible, unreal, as if I could drift down the stairs and they would still talk about me in the third person as if I wasn't there and didn't exist. And if they stopped talking about me, perhaps I wouldn't exist at all.
Strange how some of us solitary and only children are so starved for attention when people say that only-children must be spoiled. An ex-roommate recently blamed what she saw as my inability to share space with others as being due to my spoiled only-child upbringing; I saw it as a desire to have other people respect my space, my property, and my existence, and that even invisible people that don't matter shouldn't have to keep their shampoo in their bedroom behind a stack of books to keep the roommates from using it all.
(forgive the late-night babbling; your words seem to have sparked something in me.)