“Woke Up Emotional”

A depressing thought just ran through my head. I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for a place I belong, a group of people I belong with; a place where people want me, that I want to be, where there are others who are like me and I am like them. But there are no people like me. It’s the double-edged sword of being such an eccentric, unique individual. How do I feel about it? Some days it doesn’t bother me. Some days it makes me really sad. Some days I just hate it.

* * *

I woke up really angry this morning. On the way in to work, there was a wave of depression. I don’t know how much of it is from the dream. There’s also some stressful stuff going on in my life—my work is moving to a new building. That’s stressful, but more so because of how it’s stressful for everyone around me. I try to not let other people’s issues affect me, but I’m not as good at it as I wish I were. I’m just really feeling the need to curl up and hide away somewhere.

* * *

At my lesson yesterday, my professor made a joke about me needing to get over myself. It’s really stuck with me. Upset me. I can’t seem to tease out why. It was one of those meant to be funny like a joke but was just too edgy to dismiss. It’s hard to write about. But I think this is a kind of thing that comes up for me.

I think about it, and the incident was over the way I had notated something in the score of my piece. He let me know that the right way to do it was blah blah, and he showed me how. And that was fine. I let him know the reason why I did it the other way was to save myself time and to keep the music looking neat. At which point he told me to get over myself. Like, it’s a hey, “hey you don’t get to be special, do it the way everybody does it” kind of thing.

Curious. That I should be feeling so isolated and alone, the day after being slapped down for supposedly asserting my different-ness.

I don’t see it that way. And it’s weird to me that I should slapped down for being different when there’s so much non-standard notation out there anyway. But that’s not the point. There’s something in me that hurts really bad when I get told (or when I hear) that I’m not special. What is that about? Something to talk to the therapist about, for sure.