Disconnected.

My heart is heavy tonight for several reasons, some I can’t grasp myself and some I will never be able to articulate here. I was moved and intrigued in the midst of this heaviness to read this post by Newscoma about Southern baggage. Everyone the world over has baggage, but as I said in the comments there, there is a baggage that only Southerners know, and I’m not sure it’s one we can ever fully unload.

I’m thinking more about a sort of personal spiritual baggage I’m dealing with tonight. I was talking with some beautiful girlfriends last night about turning 30 this year (and that’s so not what this is about, but it’s related) and how I’m dreading it and how it’s the drama of my 20s that has made me worried about what my 30s have to bring. I was talking with my best friend a week or two ago about how she and I and several people we know are about 10 years behind most people our age in terms of relationships and even maturity, in some ways.

I’ve spent my 20s looking to connect. I began this decade of my life deeply entrenched in a culture I have almost completely disavowed now. I know you’re not supposed to have regrets, but I do regret where I chose to begin my education. I regret it academically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I and my peers had unreasonable expectations placed upon us, and when we failed to meet them, had our personal faiths held over our heads. I went on to work as faculty in a very similar institution, and just nearly ended up losing my faith, period, by the time I left there.

The thing is–I still believe in the things most important to me. In the truth I was raised hearing. I just don’t believe in the people who twist it into something manipulative and burdensome. It was those people I largely connected with from the age of 18, and who shaped much of what became my inability to connect with others since.

I’m bad at relationships. I’m horrific at romantic relationships. I won’t analyze that from every angle tonight, as it would be impossible anyway. I just wonder how different my life would be if I’d learned at a younger age not to expect the impossible from myself. Because the impossible that I’ve expected for so many years hasn’t even been something I myself have wanted.

If I didn’t have the best family ever, and if I didn’t have the anchor of my own personal beliefs, I’d have given up on a lot of things by now. I’ve watched friends who didn’t have such veer off in directions even they hate, but feel they have no choice because the things that had been expected of them had ultimately driven them away. I found out tonight–in an extreme example–that one guy I knew as an acquaintance who had begun at the same institution I did, but a few years before, decided not to bother anymore. His funeral is tomorrow.

He didn’t have hope. I am thankful that I do.

When I was a lot younger, I thought drama was sexy and that to really live meant…well, crying a lot. Unfortunately, that morphed into a disdain for anything boring or tedious. That combined with a budding perfectionism and ended up as a refusal to do anything I wasn’t completely engaged in. That turned into an inability, it sometimes seems, to do anything–to figure out what I want to be when I grow up; to date someone I have anything less than magical chemistry and everything in the world in common with; to, it sometimes seems, make any decision of a practical nature.

I question everything and am rarely content. And I don’t know what to do about that. I just know you don’t get to redo life. You just have to do it. Even when it’s boring or doesn’t make sense.

A lot of folks I know who are around my age dealt with divorce or unexpected babies or the deaths of parents as the traumas of their 20s. Those are the curveballs of life that they will now spend much of their 30s (and on into the rest of their adulthood), I imagine, trying to work through and overcome. I went through none of those, thank God. The fact that I am so untouched, though, goes back to what I said before about connections–I spent my late teens and early 20s trying to connect with the wrong people and ideas. Those people and ideas, though, were themselves connected in a false way with the people and ideas I really do believe in.

That’s cryptic and complicated, and I’m sorry.

Point being, it became hard to know whom I could trust–and least of all, myself–and so I sort of put off life. I’ve only recently even begun to make friends as an adult or achieve many of the things that most people do a good 10+ years before they’re my age. I crave connections while simultaneously avoiding them. I’m more candid here in the ether, where it’s safe, than just about anywhere.

I guess, instead of tangible traumas, I will spend my 30s and the months leading to them and the years beyond working through my own personal disconnect with people and belief and the ability to just live life. I hope to unload the baggage and guilt that has come with such. I hope, finally, to connect.