I read all of Moab is My Washpot in the last two days. Stephen Fry's life and background are nothing like mine. But it's the first autobiography I've read where I feel like I can actually relate to the person writing it.
I've read Katharine Hepburn's, Tina Fey's, Carrie Fisher's and Beverly Cleary's autobiographies, and was reading about a life I didn't understand. These women were touched by things I was never effected by with worries I've never had.
Stephen's is like peering into a parallel version of my own brain. In some places. Stephen's capacity to love and appreciate is far greater than anything I can understand.
Which is what I wonder about. I worry that all love is Stockholm Syndrome for me, because I have never, ever experienced a total immediate attraction to anyone. Curiosity, yes, interest. In high school I did develop a hopeless crush on an upperclassman who came out the year after he graduated and had the power to render me brainless. If I have a physical type, it's that. But I've never been struck with an instant physical need for another person.
I distrust my single adult relationship, because, well, I don't know that it was ever a right choice. The entire relationship began from an absence of compelling reasons not to be in it and advanced under the same circumstances.
Perhaps I'm really not cut out for these types of relationships at all. Not to say that I'm not a valuable person worthy of anyone's interest, but, maybe there isn't anybody that I'm ever going to feel that way about correctly, as opposed to a self-maintained exercise in learning tolerance and compassion for someone who repeatedly proves they didn't deserve it.
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