A nice evening turned into a difficult night, with interrupted sleep and emotions like skidding along black ice in the dark. I think I got to sleep around 2am, finally by cramming myself into a corner of the room where I could lie against the drywall for cooling purposes. I woke up around six, and I don’t remember what I was dreaming but I’d finally started to enjoy being asleep, and all of a sudden I had to blow my nose and before I knew it I was sitting upright in this room again.
I won’t exhaustingly describe just how bad I felt when I became awake, but it really was bad. Probably best to say simply that I’ve felt in danger for some time of utterly stalling on my project and/or being dumped and/or doing something rash to myself. There are lots of ways in which my mind shits all over me in response to any one of those anxieties, but the details are labyrinthine, not very interesting, and largely meaningless outside my fucked-up imagination, so I won’t, but I’ve been deathly tired of feeling punished.
What followed was useful. I’d like to think of it as a little bit of a breakthrough.
For a while since I got back from the UK in October, I’ve been keeping an emotional journal on my computer. The act of writing makes it easier to be honest. I’ve never got the hang of talking to people, and left to my own devices I prefer to avoid it, and when forced into it I’ve noticed I have a disturbing tendency to lie, in small ways, almost like I’m trying to reassure myself of something – precisely what, I don’t understand. I often have a terribly hard time of understanding how I feel at any one point in time. Writing seems to help me understand. So I write.
Lacking any other idea of what to do, I got up and started writing in my journal at 6:20am. There are a few paragraphs – “My imagination is a bastard. I wish I could give it a vasectomy.” should be enough to give you an impression – and then right at the end, I typed: God, do I feel lonely and worthless.
I got up. I think I went to the toilet. I came back, feeling something still worrying at my brain, something I’d left out, and started writing again at 6:45am: realising that my entire life, I’ve felt two things as universal constants: loneliness and worthlessness. They’re just there, like gravity.
The breakthrough is noticing that these things have behaved like constants. I mean, they may end, gradually, and by all means let’s hope so, but to think, to have thought, that one day they would just end and be over and cured – well, I can see how I liked thinking that, especially when a boy was hypothetically involved, who doesn’t like the idea of being redeemed? – but it sets me up for some dreadful disappointments. Say, for instance, when I make the biggest change to my living circumstances I’m ever likely to make, and later notice that I remain fully capable of being a shit, or feeling needy, or waking up and wishing I hadn’t.
If I choose to believe that these feelings of loneliness and worthlessness are constants, like gravity, I can limit some of the damage they do to me. Because gravity isn’t my fault. Because I can’t blame anyone else for its persistence in pulling things towards the centre of the earth, even after I’ve sold my guitars and given up my home and my job and many of my excuses. Because I can’t argue that gravity shouldn’t apply to me, and I can’t expect that it will ever go away and leave me alone.
This isn’t the answer to anything, it’s not the truth and the light, and it’s such a recent discovery that I don’t know what all of its implications are yet, but if it means that I treat the people in my life, including myself, with more generosity and kindness, I’m all for it. Perhaps I’ve arrived at this idea many times before, and will arrive at it many times again, each time failing to remember that I have decided to believe this before. I confess I feel a little haunted by this possibility, which is why I’m writing this here rather than on my hard drive or in a notebook. But I’ve written enough now.
