Ahhh, end of a long grueling week, but it felt soooo good to be working my arse off. Good like it's never felt before. I used to really get stressed out when working. I had these flashbacks today to sitting in an empty office in the giant computer science building at Rutgers that my dad worked at. He stuffed me into an empty room one summer in an attempt to perhaps teach me things and put me to work so that I could put it on my college application. Nonetheless, the experiment was a failure. I don't remember what I did. But I think it was simply try very hard. And repeatedly get frustrated.
All I remember were little things like - marveling at how unused this barren-feeling room was. And yet, it had a happy energy around it. Like it was smiling every day as the sun shone on it through its large window, overlooking the New Jersey skyspace. And the area itself was very potent for me. Just a short walking distance away was Marvin Lane, a grad student residence that my family lived at for 5 years when we first moved to the states. Those were my ages 5-10. There were good memories, but there were also bittersweet memories of emptiness and loneliness.
My dad's office hadn't changed since he moved to the states. There was something about him too, that I felt like wouldn't let go. And it's almost as if he passed off his perspectives and views on work to me at one point, in a subconscious way that he did not know, and throughout my life, as his daughter, I felt the same core problem but tried to deny it.
So that summer, I was a teenager at the end of my high school years. There was no way he could get me to do anything. I just moaned and complained and any advice he'd try to give me felt like too much. I excitedly ran off to MIT, and now have landed my dream job working at another university. And so ultimately, have landed back where he left me. And through all my experiences have only gotten closer and closer to the heart of him.
But I remember these unusual sandwiches my mother started to pack me that summer. That was almost around the advent of my digestive pains, so my mom, out of a great kindness during that period of time when she was enthused about sending me off to a great university, started to make sandwiches for me. She never did that. That wasn't her style. She was a financial analyst who left what I ate up to me, but she starting to make me this, which I remember really tasted like she had put the special ingredient of her love into them. In the center they often had a giant hard boiled egg, often still a bit creamy. And around that, avocado, lettuce, tomato, carrots, other veggies, and some delicious sauce she concocted.
I typically would not like or remember such things, particularly because eating food has given me pain for some many years, so I rarely have stunningly positive memories from any of my meals. But in this sterile office, after nearly pulling my hair out over nothing, and feeling my intestines eat themselves alive because of all the stress I carried... I ate these gooey messy sandwiches which were filling and large... and that was perfect. That I remember, bite by bite. And naturally I felt horribly sick afterwards..bleh.
That was my life and my absence of it. And reaching through the few books on the bookshelf on the room and finding a book of holocaust images strangely placed there. It's my dad's scientific and detached perspective that really confounds me sometimes. There were images of people mutilated by the war and descriptions of what was done to them, like castration. And yet... the book just quietly sat there in this sterile rarely used office in the middle of New Jersey.
I of course was deeply affected and had no way to press a 'stop' button on my emotions, so one day I remember spending just doing that - crying and feeling traumatized over all the images I had just encountered.
I felt like I was so young and still so unexposed to the world. So affected by everything. But everyone told me I was about to become an adult. When would that happen though? I was unable to work on my own. I was only used to working under pressure and instruction. I could not emotionally handle the things I casually encountered. And my physical health rendered me unable to sit in a chair normally for long periods of time. I just felt raging pain. So I was pretty certain if I got anywhere in life, it would be by a sheer miracle and subsequently had little faith in myself.
And then there was that empty feeling I got when I looked out the window. New Jersey always seemed too quiet. 'Empty' is really the only right word to use. I can't pin it down.
But there was some lingering depression from my childhood, as if it was supposed to all build up to something, and all the pain of moving here from my comfortable and beautiful Croatia was supposed to justify itself. But it wasn't what I expected, this Disney land of freedom. I had quiet angst about it.
So back to the empty room. I actually felt happy there, if I didn't think about how pointless that experience was. And how poorly efficient I was at making good use of my time. I clearly remember just staring into space there. Marveling at how absent it felt of any energy at all. Esp. emotional energy. But it was comforting too. It was happy, light, airy, spacious, empty, quiet, beaming, unknown, unused, and ah.. I forget what else I need to say about this. But that's what came up today, and that made me happy. Either way, I'm happy to be where I am right now. I experience myself as the same person, and much less of a train wreck. :-)
