Completely incomplete...

He tells me I'm seeking validation.

I look at him from the corner of my eye as he drives, "Why do you say that?"

Everyone is, he says. Look for validation from that special partner, telling them they're worthwhile. Looking for validation from a paycheck. From a job title. Something that simply tells them that they're worth more than they think they are.

That they feel they are.

Hand-holding over the center console.

He's right.

It's not as though a statement like that could ever be wrong as we scurry about, trying to show everyone else who we think we are, who we want to be, who we want to be seen as, desperately hoping that someone believes it and supports it by their own actions.

As much as I try to pull away from it, I know I am searching for that validation.

I know that if he did leave me, as things stand, the pain and generated feelings of anger and embarassment would be over how I feel that I am not enough.

As if anyone could be "enough".

I was not self-confident enough.

That would be the sticking point. I know he finds me attractive, beautiful even. I know he delights in my sexual abilities and my intelligence. My ability to keep up with him and our common focus on survival, on logic, on efficiency, on ability.

We are what we can do.

But those moments of doubt that creep in, sometimes as the over-politeness I hide behind. The quiet, introverted moments where I realize that I do not fit into a social situation, and the best thing to do is step back and let time wash it away from me.

The anxiety, the annoyance with my body, the chemical addiction I try to pass off as something that isn't such a big issue, but it is, oh it is. My frustration at my perceived weaknesses, my lack of faith in ever landing myself one of those corporate jobs that would prove to me I could fit in.

That ever sought need to be able to pass as normal.

Because if you aren't able to pass, something is wrong. I need to know I can slip between the lines of what I am and what everyone else is, and that constant concern that I will not be able to, that I'll always be just slightly outside everything, just making the mass slightly uncomfortable with none of them able to quite pinpoint why but they know, oh they know, something's a little off-kilter.

I know I will never be "normal".

I just want that ability, that choice, to blend when I wish. To show that I am functional and can be in that world should I choose. That my lack of... whatever it is that is so very missing in me, does not handicap me like it does others.

I know it should not bother me. What good is it, to blend in with the mass? Why should I care?

Maybe I'll get over it, one day. Stop trying.

I don't want to change myself as much as learn how to do it. How to be on the inside.

And if I can't be on the inside, yes, I do want that validation. I do want to see, to know, that my oddity, my disconnect, has done something for me. That I'm not going to be a strange little girl living out an average life somewhere in the nowhere-mass of suburbia or wherever I land.

That it meant something.

That these years, all of these years, each of which that contains no memory of me belonging, no matter how hard I tried.

Junior High, I remember that. I looked at magazines and tried to figure out what was "normal", and then my mother took me to the mall so I could pick out "normal" clothes and be "normal" and all of these other kids that I had never met would never know that I had not been "normal" at my last school.

I remember the cute button-up blouses, the thin gold-chain I had borrowed from my mother, the shoulder length golden-blonde hair I used to have, cute jean-shorts, and some shoes from Payless that looked like what was in at the time.

So excited that I could pass, that I could fit in and have normal friends, have a group of close female friends, pass notes in class, go to slumber parties and go on group dates, go to the school dances with my new-found friends. Trips to the mall, to Disneyland, the movies...

It didn't work.

I don't remember why.

I tried. I really did.

After maybe a week of that, I gave up. Went back to my normal clothes. Made a few friends.

And that was that.

I do look back at pictures of myself in junior high and high school. Gold-blonde hair with light streaks from the sun, tanned skin... and I wonder why.

I wonder what happened that causes people to not recognize me now. People that were my classmates in multiple classes every semester for the three years I attended high school see me now and it doesn't compute to them. What I was is so far removed from what I am, it boggles them.

I look at those pictures, look at my eyes, the simpering smile in so many of those pictures. I look weak. I had no idea what was in store for me.

What I would do to myself.

I should have more self-confidence than I do. Just through time, just through events, I should know that I can survive, that I will survive, and that I will do it well. Wounds, both on body and heart, heal.

And, to quote a favorite of mine... "Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the pain. Move on."