too many feelings

 This is just my brain being....my brain. But I'm sad and also disappointed but also angry at myself for being disappointed because I'm disappointed for a silly reason. So I am writing this all out in hopes of GETTING it out so I'm in a better mood and can do piano practice. I already have dinner sorted - I found a recipe online for these beef-garlic noodles and I have leftovers (don't use the full pound of farfalle if you make it, it makes too much. 3/4 pound would be plenty). I also mixed up a just-instant white-chocolate flavor pudding to use up the rest of the half-and half, and I'll open a can of what we used to call "Mexicorn" (is it racist to call corn with peppers and onions Mexicorn?)

Today was the faculty appreciation "hour." (It used to be a whole evening and they fed us dinner; now it's an hour on some random Monday near the end of the semester, and there's a plate of dining-hall cookies and crudites as refreshments). 

I went, mostly to support the people winning. I had been up for a teaching award (I talked about it back in February) but I knew honestly that I wasn't going to win - there are people more deserving than I, and as it's voted on by faculty, it's people better known across campus than me.

But I confess, stupidly, I got my hopes up a tiny bit. More about that later.

But what made me sad? They do in memoriams and there were three people I had known pretty well - the former Print Shop Lady (we all called her that, she didn't mind, her name was Pam), and a woman I had been in AAUW with. And then my friend Jane E., who had been a fellow congregant until her health declined to the point that she had to move closer to her adult children.  I had forgotten she had died and so it kind of opened the grief back up a little. 

I THINK I was also sad because once I opined "usually the winner of the teaching award is someone who is retiring, or someone who has received a serious diagnosis, and yeah......it was a colleague who is battling a major medical thing, and recently had a complication, they actually could not be present because they had a medical appointment and....it just makes me sad. I like this person. the students like this person. They're really young, and I feel like this is just another horrible unfairness of the universe that they're dealing with and I hope with all my hope they beat it. 

But the disappointment, which was stupid and silly - before I knew the other nominees*, I had allowed the tiniest hope I might win

 (* I don't vote in these when I'm up for one, I feel like I should recuse myself). 

And another colleague won for research, which is also deserved. 

But I feel bad. Bad that I'm so mediocre compared to other people and again I bitterly think that it's probably bad for parents and teachers to praise their kids for being good at school because then those kids get used to external validation, and they don't learn the internal kind, and I've *always* been bad at internal validation.

But I also admit I had the salty thought on the way home: why should I even TRY to stop being mediocre if I never have successes? Maybe it's not worth it and my role is to just live out my career and retire and be forgotten and never have made any kind of impact on anything. (And I suppose a form of that bitterness is actually a supervillain origin story, isn't it - "I can't make the world better but I can damnsure make it worse!" and then you start stealing tiaras or something). 

But I'm also mad at myself because it's such a stupid thing to be salty about. The award winners deserved their awards far more than I would, I frankly kinda suck, and I just need to accept that, that I was never really that good at much beyond taking tests, and in adulthood? being good at taking tests is worthless. 

So anyway. 

There's also discussion on Bluesky again about covid isolation, and one of the really heavily followed and sort of "elder" members commented that even though they were fundamentally an introvert, they did NOT have a good time during covid, and there were a lot of people chiming in that even for introverts the isolation was bad (and the original commenter even acknowledged that they had a partner, and figured it was probably harder for people who were totally single, and YES IT WAS). 

and of course a few people who have to be right all the time weighed in with something like "so you're saying you wanted to go to the bars" or something similarly nonsensical, and another person parodied it claiming that those were the people with the "wire monkey mother" mocking those who chose to cling to the "cloth mother" (it was a whole psychology experiment, it could probably not legally be done today because of animal use and care guidelines)....and yeah. 

Someone else commented: "...but being SO isolated made me fall apart in ways I'm still trying to claw back and nearly ended my marriage." and yeah. "falling apart in ways I'm still trying to claw back" fits me. I feel like I've lost my SPARK that I used to have, and even going to counseling during didn't fix that. I feel like part of the reason I maybe kind of suck at things now is that I just....I got this feeling that my life might not last much longer, so why bother? I think also mourning my dad during that time (he had died in July of the previous year) and a couple friends who died less than two months after hit hard and really made my brain hang out in morbid places. AND I had a low level cancer scare (short version: I thought I had completed menopause, had a surprise! period, my doctor wanted to make me have some fairly intrusive tests done but did say she wanted bloodwork first. The bloodwork showed I wasn't in menopause yet and her assumption was I was close, but the stress changed things....)

So it was a LOT. All at once. And I remember going multiple weeks without talking to people other than on the phone, and that is not the same. 

Another person commented: "People are all like “remember his creatively liberated we were during Covid?” No I don’t. I was creatively hobbled by it. I spent most of 2020 drinking and playing Skyrim."

And yeah. I didn't drink or play Skyrim, I listened to a lot of BBC news on the (now dead, because of copyright holders) phone app and I watched a lot of Murder, She Wrote or Parks and Rec on Amazon Prime. I barely knit at all, even. I struggled to teach online for the first time in my life. 

I remember how at the beginning of the pandemic I bought a bunch of ice-green fingering weight wool and a pattern for a complex cardigan, thinking it would be my lockdown project. I couldn't start on it. I couldn't even wind off the yarn. I ran across it in my stash a little while back and wondered if I'd ever be able to think about knitting it up or if I should just give it away to someone.

I know I've changed and not for the better and while I've tried to get back to the person I used to be, it seems she's not coming back.