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At 42 And Post-COVID, I Think I Tolerate People Less And Less Now
Pretty accurate illustration of me there, eh?
A year ago today, I turned 41. (That’s how math works.) I wrote a very “eh” post on that day. A couple of years back, I turned 38 and wrote a wholly self-indulgent post about that. In fact, if you’ll let me be an aggrieved white male for a second (“What exactly are pronouns?”), what had happened on that 38th birthday is I was working at this marketing agency, right? They had a big deal about decorating employees’ desks for birthdays. I came in and nothing was decorated. (Usually it happened the previous night.) At the time, I had been working there about seven weeks and came in 3–4x/week, so I was figuring I was worthy of a few balloons. Nope. I mentioned it to someone midday and they said “Oh.” I think I got balloons the next day (not my birthday) and about six months later, I got told in a review that someone thought I was “aggressive” regarding asking for balloons on my birthday. I probably was, and I don’t shrink from that. But I mean, if you do it for everyone else, and you don’t do it for me … how am I expected to feel? Warm and cuddly? I dunno.
Where I broke in the past year
The biggest failure of any given year for me is probably drinking, although I have been doing better about that of late, which is a good sign and development. Yay. This past 12 months, the biggest thing that broke my soul was doing IVF and having it fail. We were largely even doing IVF because of me, so now I write a bunch of stuff about infertility that I’m sure many see as wholly self-indulgent as well. The generalized problem with fertility discussions is that they are “1” or “0,” much like miscarriage discussions: if you’ve had one and later had a kid, or been through infertility and later had a kid, you’re a “1” and your empathy towards those in the “0” bucket kinda declines. We don’t like to admit this — it is not convenient, no — but it’s true.
That whole process emotionally broke me, much like being told “Hey, your sperm isn’t that good.” I also don’t make a lot of money. (Some years, I have.) So I’m not a “provider” or a “sire children” guy. It can feel like I’m an abject failure of masculinity — which, as you may have guessed…
