In Which Queenie is Gripped by a Hopeless Melancholy

Disclaimer: If you're not interested in self-indulgent entries about my mood-swings, skip this one.

I feel like Eeyore today, bitterly depressed and dogged by a sense of failure that I can't seem to shake. On the way to work this morning I gazed pensively at the full hunter's moon, hanging low in the still-dark skies; it was so silvery-beautiful and distant that I almost ran my piece-of-shit car into a ditch from distraction with it. I'm inclined to place blame for my alternating fits of rage and sadness on that moon, but it could just as easily be a hiccup in my hormones, or the fact that, after a good long period of time sober, all the THC has indeed been leached from my fat cells and my cerebral functions are waking from one long-ass slumber. Whichever, I wish the fuck it would quit. I'm not good at being depressed.

As I washed our supper dishes a short while ago, a prodigal memory returned to me, vivid and sharp. I was in high school, and one of my teachers had noticed a marked dip in my usual participation levels, a blown fuse in my "bubbly vivaciousness", as she put it, that was to stay with me until after graduation. She, being a thoughtful and kindly woman, took me aside, and asked me what was the matter. I don't even remember what I told her - some load of absolute crap, no doubt, just to get the bitch off my back. I do remember, though, that she took my chin and turned my face to hers - an actionable offense in today's public-school climate - and asked me, "Queenie, why are you so angry?"

A dam burst. I rattled on and on and on to this poor woman, the usual teenage claptrap that I'm sure she'd heard - that I'm sure that all of you with teenagers have heard - a thousand times: "I don't belong here. This isn't the life for me. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing or where I'm supposed to be doing it, but this...this bullshit...this 'mind your manners', this 'keep your mouth shut', this 'do your best', this 'act like a lady' shit is just killing me!!"

That teacher comforted me as best she could, but the feeling stuck with me, that intrinsic out-of-placeness that made me feel like an animal in a cage. As I grew older, and had more control over my life, I drifted further and further away from all that, those everyday conventions and fucking niceties that drove me so bats as a teenager. My life swung in an eccentric orbit, yes, but I was happy. I had an unusual and catholic education; I saw the world. I had unconventional jobs in unconventional places, with unconventional people - okay, mostly nutjobs, I'll give you that - but I was doing what I wanted to be doing. Except...

...except. I wasn't "respectable", and the knowledge that I was moving further and further away from the mainstream nagged at me like a splinter in the soft flesh between thumb and forefinger. I wasn't doing the kind of things that one hopes one will be doing when one returns to one's high-school reunions, fifteen or twenty years later. My parents, though they loved me, were shocked and saddened at some of my choices; after all, they raised me to be somebody's trophy wife, not some artist, not some shady gallivanter. And slowly, as the years wore on, I came to want to see how the other half lived. I was tired of letting my family down. I was sick of seeing the look of shame in my mother's eyes when she told her friends from the country club no, she's not married yet, she's not working for a major corporation, she's...well, she's traveling at the moment. Right.

Keep your mouth shut. Act like a lady. Fools' names and fools' faces - always seen in public places.

So, I set about the gargantuan task, the painstaking reconstruction of a life. I dropped what I was doing, and flew "home", back to the bosom of my family. I got a nine-to-fiver. I bought suits and pantyhose, and wore them. I tamed my wild hair, tamed my wild tongue, bent, and put my nose to the grindstone. I got married. I had children. I got older, and older, and older.

Until, well, there I was at the sink, washing the supper dishes. And looking at my life. I'm a perfectly respectable adult at long last, though something short of a trophy wife. I haven't picked up a musical instrument in ten years. I work for that corporation now, the one that my father always hoped I'd land a place in, and I'm back in the selfsame money- and status-conscious suburb that I left lo these many years ago now. Daily, I keep my mouth shut, I do my best, I mind my manners, and I act like a lady.

And, once again, I'm depressed as shit.

"Queenie, why are you so angry...?"

Posted by Queenie at October 17, 2005 08:15 PM | TrackBack