Love's Labor Lost

I’m distant. If you know me, this is no fucking newsflash. I don’t really have a problem connecting with people so much as staying connected with people. I’ve spilled a lot of proverbial ink on this and why it might be. In a nutshell, low self-worth, anxiety, moving around so much as to never develop very strong connections, etc. Plus I much prefer face to face interaction and, well, with being in constant pain, I just don’t leave the house much. This is less to explain or excuse myself, but to show some work I’m putting in.

So I have an online friend. A very lovely online friend of recent acquaintance. We talk a lot, and in the short time I’ve known her, I’ve grown to value her counsel and perspective. We hit it off and fell into a fairly easy, fairly regular discourse. It was nice.

After a month or two, she pointed out that I essentially never say hi first. I gave her my pat explanation that it’s just sort of how I am, and that, while it might not look like it, I am grateful for her contacting me and our continued discussion. At this point, most people don’t press. But then, most people would simply fall back to interacting with me on Facebook, or take an “I’ll see you when I see you” attitude. But I’d never see her at Shadowland as she lives across the country, and she’d never see me on Facebook because she loathes it. So the ball would be entirely in her court to carry the weight and pace of our friendship.

I know this is unfair. I know this is basically the spot that I’m in with most of my friends. I know this is why I am rather isolated. I let it happen anyway.

But she asked me to bear some of the emotional labor burden. She was… not optimistic. She wasn’t wrong to be so, frankly. However, the next day, I messaged her. And then again soon after. It feels fucked up to me. Unnatural. Like being aware of my blinking or breathing. It feels forced. Because it is. Not the relationship or the ensuing conversations - those are perfectly fine. But the reaching out feels messed up to me.

So of course I had to analyze the shit out of it.

Ultimately, I feel grateful for the time, effort, and attention that anyone wants to bestow on me, and I hate feeling like I’m asking for more. Contacting someone feels like asking for more. As such, I sit like a fucking barnacle (not bragging about penis size, but read into it what you will) and wait for the world to check in on me. NOT because I want everyone else to expend their emotional labor, but because I ultimately feel like me saying “hi” is me trying to take from a person.

I know. I KNOW. When other people reach out and spontaneously say hi to me or check up on me, I view it as a near mystical gift. When I do the same, I view it as some horrible, needy ploy for love. I KNOW this is stupid. Many people profess to like me, for no conceivable reason than that they, in fact, like me. They would probably like it if I bestowed that mystical gift upon them. It might, in fact, be WILDLY SELFISH of me to not repay their consideration in kind.

Okay. So it’s that self-image thing. All I have to do to start connecting with people more is to stop viewing myself as poisonous. Gotcha.

I can’t imagine that there’s a level of empirical evidence that will make me feel like I’m desired as a friend, lover, etc. So it has to be me. Something inside. I have to begin the internal work, likely the seismic shift, of trying to view myself as a benefit to others’ lives. I have to start trusting that when people say nice things about me, they aren’t trying to manipulate me for some future betrayal or abuse. That people actually want me around. That maybe, if I say hi to a person, they won’t be annoyed or rethink why they ever pretended to be friends with me in the first place. I have to purge these shitty worst case scenarios.

I have to somehow find my way through nearly four decades of viewing myself as some sort of leper, constantly falling apart and infecting everyone close to me.

Or maybe it’s as simple as putting in the emotional labor? I know it’s just saying “hi.” It’s typing two letters. But the scenarios that spin out in my head bore a hole right through my chest. I literally begin having trouble breathing at the thought.

I mean Jesus Christ, my last lover of two and a half years - I couldn’t just ask her how she was doing. I had to search the internet for a funny meme to bring to her like a male bird bringing a gift for the female to incorporate into her nest. I viewed myself as having such little value to her (or anyone) that I couldn’t possibly imagine a world in which my acknowledging a person could be seen as beneficial.

Okay. End of the day, I know what I have to work on. I mean, self-image, that’s nothing new. But this is a new, specific application of it that I’ve contextualized for myself and with a specific set of actions I can at least fake until I make. I like people. I like talking to people. Sure, I need to disconnect often, but that’s normal. I’ve let my leg keep me stuck in my house, so I need to compensate somehow, so texting it is, despite how uncomfortable it makes me. I’m unhappy with the situation, so I need to change it. Simple enough.

All I have to do is not think I’m worthless.

Under construction. 

Eros and Thanatos

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Aromantic

It’s one of those times again. I’m perpetually short of breath. My skin feels tight and it feels like something has its claws in my chest and just keeps squeezing. Every day blurs into the next and all I want to do is scream. And sleep.

Sometimes I can learn something from my depressive episodes. It requires a moment of calm in the fury. It’s as if an alligator has me in its death roll, jaws tight, spinning and spinning and – somehow – I, in a moment of dispassionate clarity, notice which direction the bubbles from my scream are headed and I make a note to myself that, if I get out of this, that’s the way up.

Possibly more accurately, I’m in the irresistible gravity well of self-loathing. While I have nothing better to do than sink ever downward, I examine the physics of my fall, and, by doing some instinctive mathematics, noting all of the bodies powerful enough to exert their force on me. Thus I can infer the shape and location of the dark planets disrupting the orbit of the known objects in this tediously drawn out metaphor for my psyche.

Acute depressive episodes, if I can have that moment of clarity, allow me to measure the profile and power of the demons in the dark. If I can get a decent look at the shape of the horrifying feedback loop my brain gets stuck in, I guess it was worth something. Lesson learned, on to new terrifying vistas.

It takes a number of these insights to extrapolate a picture for myself, and it takes time, examination, and rumination to turn that picture into emotions and then words. My emotions don’t really translate well, at least not without a hell of a lot of work, so this process is laborious, at best.

This particular cycle seems to have shed some light on why I hold myself in such restraint when it comes to feeling connected to someone. To not belabor the point any further, I simply can’t place that much responsibility onto someone that I love. Allowing myself to feel loved, genuinely engaging someone on that level – at least at this point in my mental instability – is potentially a death sentence in which I make my loved one the executioner.

I have abysmal self-worth. I genuinely hate myself with the heat of a thousand comments sections. As such, I end up outsourcing my value to the outside world entirely. This ends up with me being kind of a needy piece of shit, begging for validation on the regular. Thankfully, there’s Facebook. It’s my one stop shop for people to make me feel like I have any trace of merit. I can diffuse the power of that sucking hole inside over whatever percentage of my friends haven’t unfollowed me yet.

I hate doing it. It’s tedious, annoying, and narcissistic. Also, probably not an effective long term solution. However, it’s gotten me through so far, despite… everything.

The reason I’m so scared to have a genuine relationship is because if I began to focus on just one person for all of that support I need, it would be hideously unfair, cruelly dependent, and ultimately it would taint any of the joy that romance is supposed to infuse into one’s life. They would become my reason to live, in the worst way you can imagine. Every word. Every action. Every facial tick. Everything. All of it. Everything that they do – it would be how I determined if were still worthy of drawing breath. You know, after it was all put through a filter of my own paranoia and self-loathing.

So there’s me, watching each minute thing a person does, weighing my life against that. They’d become my sole anchor to being a human. That isn’t a relationship – that’s profound sickness in the form of dependence. Romance, playfulness, confidence – they all die. All I’d do is panic each time the cloud of a bad mood crossed my lover’s face. Each harsh word, every deep sigh, all of it would send me into a catatonic haze, afraid that that would be the end of it all, that would be what pulled the rug out from under me.

What kind of person would I be if I knowingly did that to someone I professed to care about? And, in some dim, distant way, to myself? Logically I know that to rest my survival on something so potentially tumultuous as one other person’s perception of me could be disastrous. Especially when I know I’ll interpret the signs in the worst way possible. Especially since, when the chips are down, I begin losing all ability to communicate. Especially since, as soon as I begin seeing the signs of negativity, I immediately begin planning my exit strategy, hardening my heart out of self-preservation.

Especially since I know that I can in no way offer someone anything of equal value.

I can’t do that again. I can’t turn someone’s love for me into that toxic dependence again. I can’t turn someone into my life support system again. I can’t turn love into pity and obligation again.

I have to get better. I don’t know if I can, but I don’t want to be alone. Most of my relationships were pretty awful and easy to write off, but I’ve lost wonderful women now, because of my own weakness and terror. Because, like all abused children, I carved sword and shield from my own self, built myself into armor protecting… nothing. I used up all of myself to prepare for strife and suffering. I am prepared for battle, but not for life. A hollow suit of plate, fighting a battle many years lost. A ghost, needing someone to haunt in order to feel connected to the world, yet unable to stomach the guilt of being such a parasite.

There is no optimistic resolution here. No closure. No hero’s journey. I give you nothing and yet implicitly ask your validation. Same as always. 

Outcast

It was April of 1992. I was just entering my fourth school in two years, two each for fifth grade and sixth. Oakcrest Elementary in Pensacola, FL, Brevard Elementary in Brevard, NC, Fletcher Elementary in Hendersonville, NC, Hughes Middle School in Greenville, SC. No friends, no roots, no support.

Hughes was the worst. Figures it would be the school I spent more time at than any other in my life. It was a class divided. About half of the kids were the children of successful white business people. The school was less than two miles from the 10^th hardest par golf course in America, Chanticleer. On the other side of the school was a very depressed collection of houses, a place of rotting porches, domestic violence, and frequent house fires. From here came the other half of the school’s population, the poor black kids. They at least had strong community ties and all seemed to be friends, huddling together against the oppressive reminder of inequality.

Right between those two halves was a tiny sliver of outcasts, the poor whites. There were a few of us. We were ostracized by the rich white kids, and therefore easy targets of the aggression of the poor black kids. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they were the only people I could sit with at lunch.

I fucking hated them.

They were constant reminders of my solitude. The only thing we had in common was our place in the caste system. Might as well have been lepers.

One I hated more than the rest was Seth. He was this skinny ginger kid who smelled of fried food and his mom’s cigarettes. He was even lower on the totem pole than me – people didn’t like me, but they didn’t really hate me. Everyone hated Seth, and he seemed kind of okay with it. We rode the same bus, but different stops. Of course all of the pariahs rode my bus, we all lived in the same shitty neighborhood.

One day, Seth pushed me over the line. We were sitting across from each other at the lunch table after we had finished eating. I was reading Stephen King’s Tommyknockers, but was about to put it away to return to class. I looked up at him and our eyes met. He smiled and sneezed right in my face. I was always a fastidious kid, and this was an all out assault. I whipped my thick paperback across his face. Ms. Leiffer only saw that last part and I was given detention for the next day. Seth smiled as he walked behind the teacher and went about his day.

The bus ride home was tense. Randy, the fat kid (every school had one then, there seem to be more now), kept whispering at me, “You gonna take that?” Everyone loved a fight.

I got off at Seth’s stop. He wasn’t smiling anymore. A couple of other kids got off, too, also not their usual stop. It wasn’t a far walk for any of us, totally worth it to witness what they hoped to be an epic ass kicking.

I walked behind the frail little prick, pushing him in his cheap plastic backpack, trying to get him to stop and face me. He was silent. Shit, as they say, had gotten real, and he wasn’t smiling any more. I kept at him, knowing we only had a block until he could escape into his home to hide behind his notoriously litigious mother. I didn’t care if she sued my parents, we had nothing anyway. Finally, I kicked his right foot so that it caught on his left and he tripped. I could vaguely hear whoops from the onlookers, but they faded into the back. I was so mad at his affront. This little shit had the audacity to strike at me, his better. I was lower than basically everyone, but not him. How dare he?

I turned him over and he tried to ball up. I stood over him and did my best to punch him in the head a few times, but I was eleven years old and was not in the habit of punching people. It was pathetic, a thoroughly stoppable force striking a fully moveable object. After some time, hard to say how long, I was satisfied that he looked sufficiently frightened. Then, trying my best to block out the sun, I stood over him and gravely spit in his face. He took it with a sort of depressing aplomb. I turned away to walk home, trying like hell to not cry. It was a while before I heard him getting up. I turned around to walk backwards so I could face him, to stare at him to make the indignity last. He had no expression on his face at all.

Just another day.