Life on a Fairy's Wing...

This past weekend was Homecoming in the place that I call home.

(Can you call it homecoming if you have never left?)

When I was a senior in high school, I walked around with a video recorder every day (much to the embarrassment of my friends). I wanted to capture what life was like for me at that age, the edge of eighteen. I wanted to videotape all of the people, not just the popular kids, I wanted to remember the fun bits- my friends and our weird sense of humor.

I was always watching, making up stories, imagining the life that all of these people around me were leading. I was too quiet at times, and much too loud at other times. I was often just too much, and the only way I knew to avoid that was to shrink back and hide behind the camera.

The video shows all the things you might expect. Football games and pep rallies and me and my friends putting on makeup for homecoming. It shows every assembly and concert. I made scrapbooks (4 of them) filled with every newspaper article about our class.


What I don't have anywhere but inside my skin is that feeling, that anxiety that I carried, that notion that if only I would do all the things perfectly, I would somehow become a confident, more popular girl who might just catch the eye of a boy. (Not to spoil the ending, but that never happened, in high school anyway.)

I see the parallel- I'm still that girl so filled with an anxiety that threatens to overtake me, still trying so hard to do things in the proper manner, thinking that somehow this will fix all of this panic over the idea that I have no idea where life is headed.

Most of my life is deliriously happy. Most of my life is filled with blessings wholly undeserved, family and friends and a job that I love, movies and books and interesting conversations with a particularly special person. All amazing.

I can never quite pin it down, though. Never quite convince myself it's not all just about to crumble. And then I feel guilty because, after all, I am blessed with so much and this still persists.


Anxiety sucks. That is simply the point of this post.

"They were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald