From the outside I'm sure my life seems close to perfect.  I come from an upper-middle class suburban family, have a good relationship with my parents and a very close bond with my sister.  I have a ton of friends.  I am a law student engaged to a successful financial professional whose family has accepted me with open arms.  I confront life with an upbeat attitude and let problems roll off my back. 

Of course observers know about some of these problems.  Those who have met my parents know that they're a little odd; my father socially awkward and forgetful, my mother neurotic and often too much a busybody.  They may know that my sister is similarly neurotic and sometimes self-centered.  They know that law school is hard and leaves me with less free time than other people my age.  Almost everyone knows that my fiance's mother recently passed away after a long battle with cancer, leaving his close-knit family stricken and confused and looking to him for stability and guidance.  And most people who know me can attest that I do sometimes get cranky and panicky if things go even slightly wrong. 

But most people don't know even half of the truth.  They don't know that my parents drive me insane with their petty arguments and strange predilections.  They don't know about my constant fear that my parents will get divorced, or fall into ill health.  They don't know that as much as I love my sister I worry that she really is "too neurotic to function" like she enjoys saying.  No one knows that while I have something like 500 Facebook friends I often feel lonely, and like I've lost touch with too many people with whom I used to be so close.  No one knows that I did so poorly my first semester of law school that I lost my scholarship, adding to my existing fears relating to money.  They don't know that as much as I love my fiance I sometimes wonder if I missed out on someone better.  They don't know that I wake up every morning hoping that my mother-in-law's death was just an awful dream. No one knows all the regrets I have involving her -- how her son and I picked the date of our wedding without even asking if it fit in with her timetable, how we weren't around enough when she was clearly getting sicker, how I never really thanked her for the way she accepted me and showered me with gifts like I was one of her own children.  No one knows how much paperwork my fiance has to do with regard to his mom's medical bills, on top of his own job responsibilities and helping his father keep abreast of all the household business.  No one knows that as much as I love my mother-in-law and miss her I think she was partially insane for hiding so much about her illness and not making certain arrangements for how things should be handled after she was gone. Hopefully no one can tell how much I resent my fiance's siblings for their various personalities flaws, because I really do love them and any anger I have is rooted in frustration with the fact that I can't do more for these people who've done so much for me.  No one knows how hard it is to do all this wedding planning with such a heavy heart. 

No one knows that I feel guilty for enjoying most aspects of my life because I don't think I deserve any of the good fortune that I've found.  And no one knows that as good as things are, from now until eternity, I will always feel like I've failed in some way.  I am trying to learn to take the good with the bad, the outstanding with the awful, the miraculous with the tragic, and the expensive with the cheap.  But no one knows how difficult I find it to balance all the aspects of my life as well as the aspects of other people's lives that I see as my responsibility to help with.  I don't think anyone will ever really know.