The Quest For Legitimacy

In my reading of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is one of the most intelligent, deftly written books I have ever had the pleasure to experience, I have arrived solidly back at a recurring conclusion of mine. I am motivated by the desire to be seen by others as legitimate. Not just authentic, but also valid.

If ever this fact was in question, one need only look as far as this blog, which tries to be a smart chronicle of the affairs and events in my life, but is mostly comprised of banal records of my days with interspersals of quiz results, which are a sophomoric cry to be known by someone as something. As anything. I guess it might be hard to know if one is inside the mind of a woman who is almost thirty, or a fifteen-year-old who charts her exchanges with her crush with an obsessive precision that undermines the very craving for legitimacy.

My blog entries about him may be a source of regret for me someday because they are an indication of my unhealthy drive to take things that are fairly light-hearted and give them this weight... to make them ponderous, a matter of life and death, to attribute to them symbolic meaning from the lexicon of my own internal vocabulary, and in so doing, wear out everyone with my predictable analysis of that which does not really bear such examination.

Kundera illuminates the idea in his masterpiece that whatever ostensible longing you might have, it is, in actuality, a frontman for some other unnamable thing that you have no idea about.

On the one hand, I say I want to be mutually in love with a specific person, but what I really want is to be legitimized in the eyes of my coupled-off friends, I want to gain entry into something, I want what I perceive to be the concerns of someone entering their 4th decade of life. I want someone to look at me and find me credible, viable.

I am like the character Tereza who could not separate joint from marrow, even though her own peace of mind was entirely contingent on her ability to do so.