Not Quite As Functional As I Thought

Today is LJ's birthday, which means he gets to go out drinking with his friends and doing god-knows-what while I stay home. Oh, wait--that's EVERY day.

I'm not as bitchy as that sounds--really. I've just been having a series of revelations about the state of my life and why it is the way it is, and the problem with revelations is, you have to do something with them once you've got them. And I'm just....lethargic, really.

But I have realized that I have a very, very good cause to be angrier than I've ever been in my life.

Not at LJ--he's exactly what I need right now, a man whose main redeeming feature is that he exists and doesn't want to know anything about what's under my surface. I question whether this will be a long-term thing, even though I love him dearly, because I'm not sure he's able to connect with me emotionally, or with anyone else, for that matter. He's just...not like that. Which isn't a bad thing; in fact, like I said, right now it's a good thing. I am not prepared to deal with emotion right now. Not love, not hate, not even consciousness.

I feel like, for the past eight years, I have been balanced on a tiny, tiny beam over a pit covered with benign-looking mist, with horrible screams coming from inside. I can't see the reason for the screaming--but I can't be reassured by the obscuring mist, either, because there's so clearly all this horror underneath. And I'm finding that somehow, I can't stand on the beam any more.

I think back to the two years after JP died. I was absolutely raw, of course, but I had a sense of purpose. Even when I was an addict, I still felt like I had a reason for existing--even if I wasn't doing such a hot job with my life right then, I always thought there was a chance for me to be happy again.

I've been surprised, really, by how little of the past ten years I remember. I mean, I remember pretty much every minute with JP; I remember being in North Carolina, for the most part, though it's kind of a blur of grief, alcohol, and wasted hours. I remember coming home and the summer Lou and I lived together, even though at the time I was doing so much heroin that Lou accused me of trying to kill myself. Which, I guess, I sort of was.

Then I met CR.

He was in my rehab group and he seemed to have a presence about him; he was the center of things, like JP had been, and I saw that as a good thing. Later I found out it was just a front, nothing real at all. By then it was too late.

That was in October of 1997. And there are bits and pieces I remember--getting beaten in the hotel room by his "former" girlfriend; moving into the Ravenswood apartment together, then getting dumped on Valentines' Day; Tim showing up at my front door; buying myself a CD player one day, then returning it the next because CR needed some money. I remember three of us living in the studio, and getting the bigger apartment, and Bertha; and getting married, and him leaving. And, of course, all the things he told me before he left--how unattractive I was, how undesirable, how he had used me for what I could give him, how he'd never loved me like I thought he did.

When he left I told myself I was going to have some dignity about it. I didn't always succeed; I remember begging him to come back, calling him and getting yelled at to leave him alone. I wrote him long, long letters every day, and mailed them. But I thought I was keeping myself together fairly well.

Now, though, when I look at how I relate to LJ, I'm not sure I did as well as I thought.

I don't ask LJ for anything, even though on some level I know he's willing to do more around here, because I'm afraid that if I ask, he won't have any reason to be with me anymore. Because the only thing I'm good for is to work and pay the bills.

I don't talk to him, even if I have something that needs to be said. I tiptoe around the edges of questions that keep me awake at night, and I joke away my doubts about his honesty, his fidelity, whether or not he really cares about me at all. Because no one wants to hear that chick shit, no one wants to hear all that emotional drama-queen bullshit. No real man would be with someone like me anyway, unless he was getting something out of it.

I don't ask for sex, even if I'm dying just to be touched. Because I don't want to be a nuisance, or an irritant, and who would want me anyway? Who would want to touch me, and why would I even embarrass myself by asking?

I look at my life now, and I know I misinterpret some perfectly-innocent things, but there's a little voice inside me that says I can't afford NOT to misinterpret them. I can't take the risk of being made the fool again. I don't even so much care about what might or might not be going on--I care more about losing my trust in myself again. When I was with CR, I let him tell me that things were OK when they weren't, that I wasn't seeing things that I WAS seeing, that my judgements were incorrect and I was taking things the wrong way, and that I was a weak person for being who I was, and a mean person for doubting him. And when he left--when all my doubts and all my judgements and all my observations turned out to be true--not only was I left alone, but I was left with no trust in myself. Because not only didn't he care about me--it turned out -I- hadn't cared much about me either.

Someone asked me, in the comments of a post a few weeks ago, why I didn't work on my blog novel. And I never answered, because I didn't have a very good answer at the time. But I think I do now:

I haven't worked on my novels--any of them--or my poetry, or my business, or the classes I want to take, or my appearance, or my weight, or any of the other ten million plans I have for my life--because to work on those things implies that I have some level of commitment to them. Even just to talk about them is to bring someone else into the equation, to admit to someone else that I have made a plan. And if I do that--if I bring these things up, if I mention them, or talk about them, or work on them at all, in any kind of public way--then when I give up, when my insecurities get the best of me and I know I'll never be good enough to do whatever it is, or successful enough, or talented enough--when those things happen, I'll have somehow let someone ELSE down.

Instead of just myself, which I'm used to by now.

I am tired of this life, this fear, this loneliness. I'm tired of living in my skin, much less inside my head. I see signs that are encouraging--indications that I'm coming out of my shell a little bit--but more often than not I'm just amazed at how much time has passed; amazed that I'm nearly 35 and still acting as though I have all the time in the world.

I know I don't. I know the chances of some great romance are fading. I look in the mirror and I see lines that weren't there before, and I realize: I'm middle-aged. I don't know when that happened. I know I don't want the same things that other people want; but I also know that the things I DO want, I don't think I can have. It makes it harder because I had them once, and haven't forgotten what that's like.

I look back and wonder when I learned to hate myself so much, and I wonder how to stop.