Okay, so I have been getting worried lately. About me. I have alluded lately that I am kind of in a generally sour mood, but I have been totally shortchanging you – dear reader – out of your voyeuristic thrill! The truth is that my long, slow decent into madness has been in full swing recently. Sadly and surprisingly it is not nearly as much fun as I had always expected it would be. I always figured it would be more dramatic. The truth though is that it is now becoming clear to me that my destiny is for a sad, lonely, whimpering sort of naming-the-pigeons-in-the-park kind of madness rather than the loud, zesty supernova kind.
The truth is that I have simply been very sad lately and I have been feeling very isolated from the world. I have been attempting to cope with this by trying to enjoy activities which are inherently isolating. I have been reading a lot (which is ostensibly a good thing) and napping a lot (and it is true that I need as much sleep as I can get) but I can tell that things are not going well inside my head. Here is an example:
I do not enjoy going to bed at night. This has sort of always been true. Or at least it has been since I became single a couple of years ago. It makes me sad to crawl into an empty bed. So I make a subconscious deal with myself where I do go to bed at night, but rather than sleeping in my bed I sleep on my bed under a separate blanket that isn’t part of the bedding (it even kinda clashes). Most nights in the last couple years that is how I have slept. When I was feeling really bad, I would usually sleep on the couch rather than in or on my bed at all. That’s how sad going to bed makes me feel, I simply don’t do it.
Well I have recently caught myself falling asleep on the couch again. This is a bad sign.
It is especially bad because a couple months ago I was feeling quite good about life. There were a lot of reasons for that: my general mood was better, I felt (at the time) that I was getting a handle on my simply-impossible workload at work, and I was also sort of seeing a charming and delightful girl who made me laugh.
Well those things have all shifted a little recently (though not truly irrevocably in any case), just enough to throw off my equilibrium some. Plus, for some reason I can’t quite figure out, I have been spending a lot of time walking backward through my own biography and along the way I have met some ghosts I thought I had buried already.
So – as I like to point out to myself often – none of this is as bad as – say – the average day in a Haitian slum, though for me, it has been getting pretty bad. How bad? I’ll tell you: Have you seen this Google commercial?
Well the first time I saw it I found it charming, but kind of sad. The second time I saw it I started crying like a howler monkey that – due to a childhood emotional trauma - cries instead of howls. Every time since then, when I have seen the commercial come on, I have either leapt across the room to change the channel or simply left the room entirely.
I’ll be honest, I know exactly what I am feeling lately. It is plain and simple fear. Fear of a lot of things, the things are complex, but the fear itself is not. I am afraid that I screwed things up with my charming and delightful friend (albeit in entirely new and interesting ways which differ from the ways I have screwed things up with other important women in my past). I am afraid that the stress cloud of my work will simply never let up and just hang and continue to press down on me until I … just … can’t … stand … it … anymore … and I will just bail on my whole life to get away from it (I have done something like that before once and it hurt a lot of people I cared about). I’m also afraid that I am going to “turn the corner”. What does that mean? Well I will tell you!
I have often heard – in relation to professional men (and occasionally women) – that at a certain point, if they aren’t married and/or raising a family, that they “turn the corner” and essentially give up on the whole endeavor. That they accept that their lot in life is to be alone and they deserve it for some reason. It is a kind of complacency that accepts failure. This is when single women start trying to adopt Chinese orphans or when men decide to get a pilot’s license or become SUPER into paintball at the age of forty-two. You intrinsically understand this and probably know some people like this. For some people the acceptance eventually makes them happy, so god bless them. But I know that it wouldn’t make me happy.
Truth is that I do want to be able to share my life with someone, but I refuse to get into one of those so-so, erstwhile, good-enough-for-now type of relationships that I see a lot of people engaging in. I have always called these “time killing relationships”. I’m simply not going to do that. I think it is kind of unfair to everybody. Unless I can be head-over-heels, madly, burningly in love with someone, I’m not going to bother. That’s awful to say, right? Well, this is the dark side of being stupidly romantic deep down; it puts a chip on your shoulder.
But yes, I am afraid of one day ending up simply alone. At the moment though it is just something that I worry about in the same way that I worry about getting Cancer; “I’ve still got time,” I tell myself.
I’m also smart enough to know that one shouldn’t look for their own happiness in other people. That if you allow someone into your life, it should be to compliment the happiness you already have. So I have been trying to figure out what actually makes me happy. I figure that if I can concentrate on those things, then I can make some strides not just toward making myself feel better, but toward actually being better.
But it becomes a vicious circle! For instance, I actually do enjoy reading. But when I sit down to read a book I find myself asking, “Am I reading this book right now because I want to? Or because I am trying to hide from my unhappiness?” And then I get angry at myself because I’m all like, “Well I WAS having a perfectly nice time reading until THAT thought popped into my head and now I’m not sure!” And that seed of doubt very quickly sprouts into a huge shadowy tree that throws real shade over everything else I’m thinking.
Do I sound completely mentally unhinged yet?!
It isn’t as dramatic as I’m making it seem. Basically I just want to be happy. But I don’t know if I believe anymore that happiness is state that simply happens; the way that a nice sunny day just happens. Lately I’m starting to think that happiness has to be worked for and created and tended to; in the same way that a garden has to be cared for and tended to.
I’m starting to think that the thing that is really preventing me from being happy is how much I am afraid of being unhappy. How is THAT for some self-realization! That I am the one making myself miserable? And that I should stop trying to pass the buck on to work or other people or some nebulous lack in my life?
My ex-girlfriend used to, quite often, accuse me of not being able to accept responsibility for anything. I always thought this was an extremely nasty and bogus accusation (in my defense, my ex used to accuse me of all kinds of stuff), however there may very well be some truth to it, in this regard at least. I think that I do look for validation from the external rather than the internal (I’d be a terrible Buddhist!); I’m realizing lately how much that is true. For instance, I am being more honest with you – dear reader – in this long rambling, self-obsessed blog post than I generally am with the actually people who are close to me in my life. Why is that? I have often had close friends awkwardly say to me, “So I read you blog … I didn’t know you felt that way …” How come I would rather put this crap out there on the internet where coworkers or employers or charming and delightful friends can potentially find it, rather than just talking it out with a friend over a beer? I honestly don’t know. I have no idea why I do this, except that I do feel some sense of validation in having it all written down and available to be read. I will tell the truth here, there is a part of me that wants you to turn to your friends and go, “This crazy guy whose blog I read, he is a total nut job but he’s evisceratingly honest about himself in a way that’s kind of interesting.”
But more than that, this is a kind of therapy for me. Forcing that which is internal - and deeply personal - out into the realm of the external, is a way of forcing it out into the light, so that I can better deal with it. I was trying to explain to someone recently that you don’t run away from the things you’re afraid of, you run at them. With a big pointy stick and you scream “Let the wild rumpus begin!” This is sort of my way of doing that.Also, I’m a middle child. That probably has something to do with it too.
So anyway, what have we learned today, dear reader? I guess it boils down to: Jamie, calm the fuck down about everything! You’re making yourself sick!
And probably there is a lot of truth to that. I will now go and read a book and try to enjoy it rather than drive myself crazy about it.
If you have read this far, I just want to say thanks for sticking with me! Even if you only hang around here to feel good about your own mental state by comparison!
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