Scared

I often wonder if the people I think about ever think about me.  If I'm important to them in any way.  It's very important to me that I am important to someone.  I guess it comes with not believing in a deity or a divine purpose.  I don't think I have a purpose to my life.  So I generally approach it with the thought that if I am important to people, if I help them, if I make them happy, if I give them something to think about, if I change their lives, that's enough.

I think about people often because they are important to me.  Not the people I displace my loathing on.  But the people I once did legitimately hate.  The people I've loved.  The people I've understood in ways that resonated entirely too well with the way I understood myself.  I think about people often because of the ways in which they've shaped my life--good and bad.

I'm starting to worry not only about not having effects on people, but also about nothing significant happening in my own life anymore.  I tend to get caught up on the last really significant occurrence of my personal life.  The last was two years ago, which is where I seem to have been stuck for a while.  Before that, it was a little over six years ago now.  I just get stuck and can't move past these things, I keep trying to connect everything to them and not really moving forward with my life.

And even though I think I am moving forward now--doing things, accomplishing things, meeting people, and so on, part of me is undeniably still back there.  I don't know how to wrench myself free.  And I don't think I'm going to have moments that are as meaningful or personally significant for quite some time.  I will have professional accomplishments, undeniably, I may have emotional triumphs, but not in the same way, I don't think.

It scares me because my life is growing boring.  I'm at the point where I'm not even terribly interested in meeting new people anymore and I don't think I will be, not any more so than I am now, anyway.  I'm settling down.  And I'm afraid that settling down for me means being stuck at a point in my life that grows more distant each day.

I'm a very different person from the one I was then, but parts are undeniably unchanged, and I don't think that's by choice.  So yes, this scares me very much.  And while I can hide it behind my work when I'm particularly busy (which is quite often these days), it's the sort of thing that haunts me over pauses like this and in the late hours of the night when I can't fall asleep.