privilege and independence

As I get older and the frontal lobe finishes its development, I find myself recognizing more of my privilege with each passing month.

Growing up I always lived a very sheltered and protected life; I was primarily around family and was rarely allowed out of my house for extracurricular or recreational activities. I spent a year at college exercising my free reign in a healthily irresponsible but responsible as an eighteen-year-old could be, before getting pregnant and getting married where I was then essentially kept in seclusion from anyone who would “tempt” me into having an inappropriate relationship with regardless of the previous standing relationship I held with them.

Over time, this has created a history of avoidant behavior and rarely an attempt to form a social life because I spent so much of my formative years trapped from engaging in normal behavior for a person my age. I have unfortunately internalized the rhetoric that was used to validate and normalize my seclusion and still struggle to get myself out and interacting within my various social circles. In spite of the adverse effects the isolation has had on my life, it is also one of the biggest reasons I am able to work part time for the entirety of my life, often taking a year or longer break between positions; I have not paid a majority of bills ever, I currently am only responsible for a handful of subscriptions and one utility bill in our house; I was also able to stay home with my son for as long as I wanted, I did not return to work until I felt ready to start working on the separation anxiety the both of us had. I’ve been able to spend most of my time primarily focused on completing my education, and to start my attempt at interacting more with my community without worrying about anything.

I have always known that no matter what I do or what happens to me, I will be taken care of, and it has created a sort of spoiled monster who is extremely aware of how much privilege she has been awarded and trying to come to terms with the fact that it is mainly due to how adaptable I am to the isolation I have experienced but also enjoying my life as it is with minimal stress and responsibilities. It has also created a complex within myself battling between desperately wanting independence and proving that I could be capable of supporting myself on my own while also not wanting at all to change how my life is now and being entirely unsure of my capabilities of being entirely independent.

My life has always somehow felt like this, I have always been acutely aware that I should really be doing more to be independent while also refusing to do so and feeling stuck in my comfort zone until finally building up the courage to do something different, which doesn’t occur often or within a short period of time. Lately the overwhelming urge to provide more for myself has been a constant presence in everything I do and every decision I make.

It has been a slow struggle with even slower progress, but it has progressed in spite of multiple regression phases and a lack of consistency with maintaining a social life. For now I have mainly extended myself to committees within the school district I live in and attended 1^st to 12^th grade, and have only recently challenged myself to engage with parents at the school my son attends but have still yet to reach my desired level of interaction with other parents of students since I am always so nervous and anxious about the perception people may hold of me as a single parent, especially since my child gravitates towards other children whose parents are typically older than I am and have been married for over half of my life span.

When I look at it all together, it is honestly a miracle that I even have social skills and can mostly handle social interaction with relative ease. I would consider myself to be more of a responder than a conversation starter, which ultimately ends me up in multiple scenarios where a stranger has a normal conversation with me but I feel essentially held hostage by the interaction, mostly because I always end up spending more time than intended chatting with older ladies, and not because I am annoyed by their interaction, or at least it isn’t a common occurrence. I feel that I make friends easily when I want to, and I rarely come across people who end up not liking me, I have an obnoxiously high approval rate and at times wish it came across as much lower. This has also been a common theme in my life, and while it can be cumbersome at times, I have come across some really meaningful strangers to my journey, and to me that is the basis of life, I wouldn’t change any of the experiences I have had with strangers and strangers who have become friends because it has fully made me who I am today. I am pieces of everyone I have loved or anyone who has inspired me to want to be better and help others, people who make me remember what life means to me.

In a very messy way to connect my ideas, I have noticed that the more I push myself to become more social and push myself out of my comfort zone or want to push myself out of my comfort zone, I find that the desire to become more independent also rises. Sometimes my life is so obnoxiously annoying because no shit, that makes perfect sense and on some level I always knew that but also seeing it in real time and actually experiencing it instead of just generally knowing that it’s probably true are vastly different in my mind. I always have some layer of doubt about whether or not what I know and think is accurate to real life, and while it almost always is, I still cannot wrap my head around it and will procrastinate on a task until I have built up the energy and courage to do it. I find myself becoming more and more frustrated at how much I have held myself back from simple tasks, so many times after spending so long trying to finish something, it frequently takes much less time than I allotted for, which annoys me for one of two reasons: did it take a shorter amount of time than I planned for because I have planned for it for so long or am I really just so annoyingly stuck in my head and self-doubt so much that it took weeks or months for me to finish a task that took significantly less energy to complete than it did to build up the energy to start.