Untitled.

This is a repeating cycle in my life: I make myself a one-person support network for others, regardless of whether they’d ever think of doing the same for me.

It’s partly a problem with my own expectations of the surrounding world, but really. I’ve got to stop putting energy into situations like this with people who, as a rule, show no interest in me on their own initiative.

Partly this is surely stress talking, but another part is this perception I’ve been trying to articulate for years. If it seems to me that I could do something to make others’ life easier, I do it, for the most part without thinking much about being inconvenienced. My innate assumption is that others think that way too, in general as well as specifically with regard to me; except they don’t. It’s not their fault, it just doesn’t occur to them, but it hurts me because I do not separate tasks from people. I keep putting myself in situations where I wait for someone to remember my existence, and one of two things happens: either they do remember and I am really, genuinely thankful (even if I did them a favor in the first place), or they never do remember and I feel somehow left out.

My god, I’d kick so much ass as an administrator. But I’m nobody’s administrator, even if I do act sometimes as though I were.

Here’s the thing that makes me most bitter: I wouldn’t mind being support girl. That’s what people do, right? Wrong: in my experience, this sort of attitude is not reciprocal.

(There are individual exceptions, of course. I’m talking in ranty generalities, here.)

Mm. I’ll get in trouble for this, but here goes: I perceive this… I don’t know, lack-of-thoughtfulness? oblivion? to be more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere I’ve lived. “Elsewhere” being USSR, Italy, Britain, so I feel that I’m not completely talking out of thin air here.

“Yeah, well, you’re in the States now, so deal.”

Yeah, well, I am not blaming anyone in particular, and will leave this country first chance I get anyway.

The easiest answer is, well, you owe nothing to people. Stop volunteering your energy. The fundamental flaw I see with that argument is that it is devolution. So, most likely, I’ll continue doing what feels good and right to me, and continue to be disappointed.

I’m so tired of being disappointed.