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I stare at this blank screen and think, yes, this is me, this is what I have become: Blank. Inch by inch something has come along and erased me, erased from me most of who I thought I was. It didn’t happen overnight, nor was it the result of a single event. It has been a series of happenings, both big ones and small ones, taking from me my hopes, my dreams, my passions, until there isn’t much of me left from which to draw a breath.

I can’t help but consider that I must somehow be personally responsible for my series of losses over these past few years. It must have been of my own doing, as I have hardly ever been much of anything that the universe would sit up and take notice and spend any time considering me.

But if I am responsible, I am not sure how. I am not sure what I have done such that doors keep closing. Time after time, when I thought I brought the best of myself to a situation, the message has been my best not good enough. Not good enough for others anyway.

This is a harsh harsh message to live with… each time I put my heart into a situation, put the best of me into something, be it a friendship or an activity, it has ended up causing me a lot of pain. One time too many and now the parts of me that have been injured, the vital parts of me that are my passions, my dreams, my hopes, no longer come out to play. Most of the time I can’t even find them anymore.

The message that I am not good enough has accompanied me my entire life. It was a horrific experience to be a self identified lesbian growing up in a small rural town in the 70’s. The only way I could cope was to keep myself off everyone’s radar. I learned to be invisible because to be seen was to be measured, and in every way I did not measure up. I earned good grades in school, stayed completely out of trouble, always went to the library when I said I was going to the library, earned a scholarship for college, maintained a solid grade point average through college and then set my sights on graduate school (where I eventually earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry). I never drank alcohol, I never smoked cigarettes and to this day have never even seen, much less used illegal drugs. My postdoctoral research ended up being featured on the front cover of the most prestigious scientific journal in my field, and was important enough that another highly regarded journal published a news blurb about the research article. (“Cell” and “Science” for those who may be wondering….).

Was that good enough for my father? My father measured me by what I was not. I was not tall, I was not pretty, I was not popular, I was not female enough, and I didn’t go to medical school. (Not that I came from a family of higher educational achievers to begin with….. so wtf re: medical school?). I also was not heterosexual. Some friends know that for me, the last time I was home that my father was alive, we fought over the disparate treatment from my parents between my brother and his new girl friend and me with a long term partner. The short of it was that my parents never saw me for all that I was, they only saw me as a lesbian daughter they did not want. I was told I was no longer welcome in their home, and I never returned until my father’s funeral. (My mother now conveniently forgets.)

My ex grew to also see me as not good enough. In the end she kept trying to change me into someone else, tried to get me to wear makeup and jewelry. It became painfully clear that I, as the person I was, was not good enough for her, in her measure. While it was appropriate for that relationship to end, it cannot be helped to have more scars when you give your best to someone and they literally look at you with disgust.

I poured myself into volunteer work, believing to live in balance meant to give something back. There was a time when I was volunteering 40-50 hours a month between different positions. Again, I gave my best to this, believing this to be a part of my higher self. Yet that too was ripped from me, and with that loss a part of me died. That part of me I haven’t been able to find again. (There were no repercussions to the abusive zoo keeper. I have to live with knowing that too.) Just the other week I was talking with an old zoo volunteer who tried to get me interested in another organization he also volunteers for. I had to explain to him that my experience was so devastating that there isn’t anything left inside me that wants to volunteer for anything now. He had known me for over a decade at the zoo and my message stunned him. I could see it on his face.

The tree accident with my car, while only the loss of a “thing” also took its toll. Being one who does not own much, having what little you own taken away due to negligence of others is tough to live with. It took tremendous amounts of time and emotional energy to work through the insurance process, the completely incompetent body shop who continued to damage my car are they “repaired it” and now the legal process I am engaged in, going after the property owners for their negligence in allowing car after car after car to get destroyed in our parking lot while they turned their backs on their responsibilities.

For all my efforts, I never seem to be able to move forward.

In this environment of “my best is never good enough” I should have known better than to believe an old friendship could be rekindled. There were far far too many differences in our core values, differences that I should not have even tried to overcome. My common sense must have left the building, no, left the country – what was I thinking. We were drawn together from what I later learned was bonds from another life (twins), but it is not another life I am living right now, it’s this one. I lead with my heart, not my head. I am a fool. If my common sense would have been in charge, it would have reminded me that to the rest of the world (save Judi, as always), my best is not good enough. My head would have told me to “not go there.” But, I did and was damaged again. My heart was ripped from me.

My life is far emptier now than it has ever been. I get up, go to work, literally sit in a dark room with no windows or sunlight all day long, doing a task that pays the bills but not only doesn’t inspire, but instead kills my spirit a bit more every day. Whoever I was is slowly disappearing. In my free time, which I have now in more abundance than I have ever had before, as I no longer volunteer, I do not do things that feed my passions. I do not because I can’t find passion anymore. I am blank.

I am not only more quiet on the outside, conversing much less than I used to, but I am more quiet on the inside, as if there isn’t much of anyone home inside me anymore. I just am. I wonder sometimes that if I make myself small enough and quiet enough that maybe the universe will not notice me and continue to take away from me.

I have learned a curious thing. One can be an empty vessel and still function, and as long as I continue to do what is expected of me, it goes unnoticed by the entire world around me that I am internally just a vacuum, empty of passion, empty of dreams and hope. Smile, do your job, don’t complain. No one looks or cares to know more than that.

So here I sit. Blank. Watching time go by. Unsure what if anything I do next. If I ever get a remotely small feeling of wanting something for myself or wanting something to do that would feed my soul, something for me simply because I would want it to be so, as soon as that small feeling or hope dares to sneak out and into the sunlight, fear of more pain overwhelms it and it goes running back to the dark places where it spends most of its time trying to hide unnoticed.

What is a person without passion or hope or dreams? The more appropriate question might be, is someone a person if they have no passions or hopes or dreams?