Freedom: knowing nobody reads this

Not supposed to care what other people think.
What a crock of shit (this, I wrote)...

I honestly do NOT care what people on the street, driving by in cars, standing across the bar, walking past me on the street, think of me.  Why should I?  They are strangers, every bit as self-absorbed as myself, wondering (maybe!) if anyone around them is thinking about them (or even noticing them!)  That old saying holds:  'you would worry a lot less what others thought of you if you knew how little they did.'

I do really care, I'm told by some much too much, what the people I live with and love think of me.  I care what I think of myself.  I care what my family thinks of me, and to some extent (the sales kind) what readers think of me.

When someone I love goes after me, names every last little (I mean little little) thing I have done wrong, which has 'embarrassed,' or put off or made angry or irritated or upset, what they say sticks in my brain like fucking velcro.  Compliments do too, but we tend -- not to hoard, so much, as simply not to think of saying them.  We think, Doesn't she look pretty, and we smile, but somehow don't bother to say out loud.  Women of course being better about this with each other -- men I think go years without bothering to say anything kind to each other out loud; they roughhouse, tease, dodge, weave.  I mean hey -- isn't that what athletes do? 

I am occasionally treated to sessions that seem to border on hatred in their vitriol, a listing of (see above) flaws that make you look at yourself the next day and see my child face aging it seems at supernatural speeds, tears, it seems, always at the ready...

Try to cultivate prayer, try to create an oasis for myself in the roar of violent emotions, a tiny spot of calm (so often centered on Zelly, my beautiful Abyssinian lynx-lookalike, who sleeps so deeply and so lightly at the same time, who finds comfort against the hard edges of the stacks of books on my bed, who makes peace look beyond effortless...)

Usually I have to put somebody else's mind/thoughts/print in front of face, try to become subsumed in that other, other-created world, with an entirely different cast of characters (for me books ARE: Calgon, take me away!!)

So thank GOD for the writers, thank you authors, thank you publishers, thank you bookstores and the iniimitable people that run them -- without you, I would be dead.

KMcC