A walk in the morning / on still being blind
I decided to go out walking early, in part because I didn't trust the weather to stay clear until after noon, and in part because I thought it might warm me up a little. Set a good, brisk pace but had to drop it down to an amble after half an hour when my shins started to tighten up. Last thing I need is shin splints; I'll probably regret it anyway.
There were quite a few walkers and joggers out by the Rose Garden; one can't talk to them, of course. Nobody even said hello, and most of them had looks ranging from something like boredom to outright agony. A couple might have been hopped up on endorphins; they looked a bit glazed over. I wonder what I look like.
I was thinking about a scrap of conversation from a day or two ago about the difference between New Yorkers and Californians -- I don't recall anything about the wording, but it involved the fact that NY has 11M people, and New Yorkers have to keep strangers at a distance or they'd be overwhelmed. OK, I grew up 50 miles from NYC, and went to school in the Midwest as well as California. I should know this.
I realized that, once again, I never noticed the difference. I still can't see it, and it seems as though the difficulty I'm having recalling the words of that conversation is that I didn't really understand them at the time. It seems as though my own shyness, anxiety, depression, and emotional blindness are enough to completely swamp any perception of the other person's (I don't have the right word here, either: style? distance preference?). I can get closer to some people than to others, it seems, but I don't have a sense of how that relates to anything else at all about them. I can't tell how close they want to get, or how close they get to other people.
It seems that there's a long list of things I just can't seem to understand; can't seem to see. This thing about closeness, whatever it's called. Joy. Love. Flirting. Implied messages. Maybe some of the books I ordered this morning will help a little. Maybe not. I'm not feeling very hopeful right now, just overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.
Yeah, I'm depressed. I'm working on that, though with no results so far. But the decades of depression seem to have let some essential sense or perceptual ability atrophy or fail to develop altogether. I don't know whether I'll ever get it back, and that hurts even more than the depression does, sometimes.
Writing about it doesn't seem to have helped much this time. It clarified the problem, but that clarity is painful and seems to get me no closer to a solution.