Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2014 9:01 p.m.

the person I thought I'd be

I have lately been struggling a lot with feeling down. I'm usually pretty good at staying strong. Even though I often type rather depressing diatribes into this diary - on the outside, I hold it together.

But I seem to be have had a few times in the past couple weeks where the sense of helplessness/hopelessness overwhelms me. I'm sure there's got to be some pregnancy hormones at play in there somewhere, which is making things a bit worse too. But I sometimes just find myself sad, unable or uncaring to figure out some way that we are going to make our lives work.

I'm just tired. Tired of being where we are. Tired of feeling like I've accomplished nothing. Here I am, 33 freaking years old, and it's as though the past several years of my life have been wasted...wasted on waiting for K to make it big so that *I* could then have the freedom to pursue some dream of my own.

I'm saddened by this apparent loss that I believed was a mere sacrifice for a possible greater good.

I love my husband and I am incredibly devoted to marriage. But it has gotten hard the past couple years. This financial struggle and his career struggle have brought out different sides of ourselves than we'd ever dealt with before. We respond very differently to adversity, and our communication styles are not completely synched, and we have a really hard time connecting. We go through our emotions separately, because we deal with them differently and it frustrates the other when either of us want to deal the way we want to deal.

When I feel depressed or helpless, I want to spring into action and make big changes in order feel alive again - K wants to sit tight and keep hoping that it's all going to work out, and then chill in front of the tv for hours on end every night to numb his mind.

It drives me crazy because I feel so stuck and it drives him crazy because he feels like I'm pushing things.

We both want to dream about a different future, but our ideas of an OBTAINABLE future don't quite match up anymore.

I go through these wide, sweeping emotions about him. Sometimes I cherish his companionship and partnership through these rough times and know that we'll make it through together, hopefully even stronger. And then other times I feel so trapped into our marriage and feel like we are both so different and wonder why we ever thought that we were compatible. I wonder if we actually could have been more compatible with another spouse. And I wonder if this is just normal in marriages after a certain point, or if there really are marriages that are happier than this and it's possible to hope for more from my own.

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I didn't mention this before, though I did think about it, but it seemed weird, or stalker-ish to write about so I didn't.

But it seems significant to my life for some reason, so I should document it. Probably just because I'm in such a rut right now and it's even the tiniest thing that made me feel the potential of being significant again someday. Or maybe it's just admiration for a life I never the courage to live.

Anyways. For the past couple years, I've been doing a lot of researching and clicking around online and just trying to figure out how my thoughts have been changing on things like my egg donations, and beliefs about God, and infertility/fertility, and same-sex marriage, and looking into catholicism, etc. And in all these searches, I'd occasionally come across the name of this one girl who writes and speaks out about some of these things. She a bit younger than me, but still, something about the topics - especially about egg donation - have always hit home for me and have been somewhat influential to me, or at least have really made me think.

So a couple months ago, on a total whim (probably on a day I was just feeling a bit bummed and decided to do something random), I decided to send her a facebook message. I had seen online that she had written a script and I thought I'd ask her about it and offer help (via K of course) if she wanted. She wrote back and as a happy coincidence, she was currently nearby for a conference and we agreed to meet up. She's been traveling with her husband and young daughter and so both our families met up at the beach one afternoon. And we just all talked and played. And then we went to dinner and talked some more. And it ended up just being a really nice day. After so long feeling so lonely in this city, with no one else around who really shares any of my beliefs about things, it was just really really nice to have a friend with so many similarities as myself. If anything, she inspired me. She has the courage to say things that while I think, I'm too afraid to say. She spends her time educating people about her passions, she's ambitious and is doing something with her life - I do nothing. I cower under my local society's presumptions of how I should be, hoping that keeping quiet and going along with the flow will somehow help K strike it rich so I can then hide behind money and influence.

I'm just having an identity crisis, I guess.

I'm also just really wishing I had the opportunity to associate with people like this girl on a more regular basis. I feel like I had the potential to be destined for something once, and if I could only associate with people like her more, that maybe I'd one again have that potential...before I became too old to have potential anymore.

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So I started a blog. Like a real blog, not just a "this-is-what-happened-in-my-family-today" blog. I'm still figuring it out and I don't post much yet, but I would like to eventfully get it out to a wider audience. I would like to have an outlet, one that people actually read, one that I feel like I could help or connect to people through.

Not a political one by any means though. I'm still way to afraid to step on people's toes. I'm still kind of a coward.

I remember back in college when I had the website that was a precursor to this diary. My Thoughts on Things. Oh, how I miss those times. When I secretly felt significant. When I secretly conversed with hundreds of people who emailed me (over the span of a couple years) over things they were struggling with, like depression, suicide, and religion. I was often just a listening ear, and who knows if I truly helped anyone. But people reached out to me, a lowly college student, and I felt connected to mankind in a way I never had before. I was significant then. I mattered, if only to strangers I'll never meet in person.

What happened to that person?

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