flexagon | Maybe I could be a waitress, say maybe somewhere in Hawaii (Reply)

miyyu has interviewed me. I told her I felt like nobody had asked me anything personal in a long time... and while that was true, answering these was also kind of tiring. Right now I'm a bit tired of being me.

What was the mental/emotional process like when you decided to be an egg donor?

Heh... I think it was much less dramatic, all around, than people tend to think when they ask this. :) I was happy. I had wanted to donate eggs for years and I already knew I was going to be childfree myself, so there wasn't a ton of thinking involved when decision-time came; it was just like "oh, here is the perfect opportunity". Also, although I was not feeling romantic toward the parents, there was something very fitting about donating them to a guy who I once really liked (long, long ago, when I was 15 and he was closeted). It was a nice, much delayed end to that story, and the beginning of another that is even longer.

I worried, before ever starting the process, that

heisenbug might be jealous. I tried to be really sensitive to anything like that. He was okay though. My parents freaked out for a while, which was stressful. And I also felt frustration, at times, when the whole thing was delayed for months because we couldn't find a gestational carrier. But, mostly I was just happy; I never had second thoughts or desires to back out or anything, and I've never regretted it since, either. It was just something that seemed like a perfect thing to do, and it was! The weirdest thing has been that other people think it must have been complicated. And they ask me about it. :)

What are you most proud of in your life?

Turning out a fairly decent, happy person in spite of my toxic upbringing. It's kind of shocking that my younger self managed a thing like that. I think my parents' views on life were so ridiculously bleak that at some point I rejected their worldview outright. (Wasn't someone complimenting me recently on sheer willpower? I have nothing now in comparison to what I had then. Oh, and that's perfectly okay with me, because I'm a whole lot healthier now.) Everything else I've done that is any good has depended on that initial Great Escape. Without that, I'd probably still have escaped religion, but I'd have been living a sad, outsider life in Montana for the last decade and being sure I didn't deserve any better. *shudder* One of the weird things is that I never had a defining moment of pushing it all away, that I can remember. There were lots of little pushes and flicks and keeping some little bit of myself on hold for better times and places... which might never have come, but did.

Sorry this is so vague. That seems bad. It also seems a bit premature to pat myself on the back just for being okay so far when it's not like the story's over. Still, I've had a pretty sane adulthood so far, and it turns out I do have things to offer the world after all, and I haven't gone postal yet... so there you have it.

What do you regret the most?

I regret 90% of the circumstances of my childhood. But assuming we're limiting this to things I could have actually done differently... I regret staying with Mike as long as I did, in college, and putting up with his crap. The number he did on my relationship self-esteem is just astonishing -- it messed me up for years, and I should never have put up with any of it. Still, it's a tough call. I know a lot of women who stayed in a bad relationship in and through their freshman/sophomore years. So it's quite possible that if I hadn't messed myself up with Mike, it would have just been someone else. Gah! Why did we all DOOOOOO that!? It was so dumb, so very sad and dumb.

Would you ever consider living anywhere other than the Boston area?

I would, yes. :) There are three other places that I think I could live: Manhattan, San Francisco and Seattle. I feel at home here, though, as I guess everyone knows, and I realize how precious and rare that feeling is for me, so I'm in no hurry to leave. I'm hoping (and it's possible!) that during my time at Zillian I might manage to spend a quarter of a year in Manhattan sometime (say, a summer) and in SF sometime (say, a winter).

Have you ever had your IQ tested? If not, would you want to? Why/why not?

Yes, when I was a kid I tested at 150. I was too young to really be making a choice about it; my parents just had me take it, and all I remember is that they wouldn't tell me my score for a long time. When I was in college I took one of the free ones as a lark one day and tested at 145, and was slightly surly because 150 is one of the classification cut-offs... you know, Genius Level (say oooh), and I was annoyed to have missed the category marker.

I never bothered getting tested again for real... it's too easy to get hung up on the number, and there are two reasons I think that's a bad idea. First, whatever it is (and there's plenty of debate about that, but let's say it's something like raw pattern-matching and processing skills, combined with test-taking skills), and whatever my score "really" is, it's pretty clear I have enough that other things tend to be what limit me. So, those other things are the things I need to be thinking about, and tend to be thinking about, when actually living my life. Second... a tool's only as good as what you use it for.

If you want to get all meme-like, say "Interview me" in the comments and I'll ask you five personal questions on topics I am curious about. Or just tell me whether you ever get tired of being you, and who you'd like to be in those moments (even if that's not who you'd like to be normally). Right now, I wish I were someone who didn't care about work or what her boss thinks of her... not someone cynical or jaded or evil, but just a bit ditzy, someone whose focus in life is definitely elsewhere. Someone with intuition about people and cultures, someone with less willpower and more intuition about the easy and graceful ways to do things. Someone who laughed a lot today.