not sure where to start

“How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.”

Paulo Coelho

I have gorged myself on the delectable fantasy of an easy way out. I’ve found myself meeting any adversity, any roadblock, any inconvenience, with the smug thought that my life is going to be so different come June that none of this should even matter to me. Why concern myself with a fleeting version of who I am? That is what grad school was going to be for me. A way out.

It is so fickle to find yourself in the wrong about something you’d developed an air of confidence about. Like two sides of me are upset with each other – one in the right and cocky about it, one in the wrong and lashing out like a hurt animal. I feel stupid, and I feel righteous. Some small part of me has been holding onto the idea of me failing, and she is boasting her win.

The absence of this clear direction has left a sizeable wound in me. The vacancy of surety makes room for panic. It did not take long for her to seep in, to tuck up snugly next to my heart and make its room for beating even tighter. It is sinister, in a small way, because I know rationally there is no need to be anxious – I have many months to figure out a next move, to find a different school, to start a new job if I cannot. But she is there nonetheless, and we both feel very differently about the realization that she will only become more obtrusive with every passing day. The sky-high water wall that will crash over me, a speck in the distance that knows my fate.

I have always tied such a massive part of my self worth to my intelligence. Why, then, is there a sigh of relief in me at thought of not enduring two more years of college? I loved getting my degree in a very distant, romantic way. I don’t remember the blinding feeling of being in it with clarity – only the soft ring of light it has left behind in its path. Some part of my subconscious must be rejoicing at this redirection. It is freeing, I suppose. I can choose anything I want, be anything I want. It is difficult to see it that way when you’re in the throngs of loss. I have even surprised myself as I write it here; I did not know I was thinking it until I read what I had typed.

Can I feel everything? I think so. Maybe this will drop a new opportunity into my path, or maybe I will have to go out and explore for it. I so desperately hope I can find the will to make something grow from the roots I have ripped out.

Until next time,

G.D.

“The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.”

Ernest Dimnet

The opportunity of a lifetime fell into my lap, and I did not take it. When I received the email from a former professor inviting me to apply to graduate school, to teach and get my Master’s and leave behind the pile of sticks and weeds I’ve cobbled together as my own in this city I do not belong to, I stood in the lobby of my job and let tears rush down my cheeks. My heart was racing, I could feel sweat slicking my palms. I hid my screen close to my body as if I’d had winning lottery ticket numbers on my phone that someone would steal if they caught a glance.

I created this gorgeous image in my head. The job I had spent two years of my life getting better at because I had nothing else to do had been sucking the beauty out of everything. I did not care about the brattish clients, or the training modules I was meant to prepare, or the sickeningly polite conversation everyone wanted to make with me. I got good because I got bored. This email, sitting in my inbox unanswered, felt like fruit in my mouth. It was summer and bright, bursting peaches dripping down my chin while I laughed; it was sun pushing against the limits of my skin, soaking into my shirt and kissing my shoulders. I could not feel the hospital white lights of the office anymore. Who could I be, back in that school? My old mentors and professors and library seats and essays and books piled high against my dresser. I could feel life waking up in me before I even set up the meeting to discuss the program.

It was June, and I needed to apply before the end of the month. I thought about all of the ways in which I was not good enough to have it, namely that I have no transportation or license in which to get it. That was really the singular thought that revolved around my head, kicking that summer feeling into a pulp. The closer the deadline got, the bigger the sinking pit grew in my stomach with the knowledge that I could not go. There was a stipend, but it was not nearly enough, and I would need to find a new job and a new apartment and take my driver’s test and buy a car and I have one month and I can’t make it. I let that fear well up in my throat and stomp out the excitement I had not felt for I do not know how long, and I did not apply and I could not feel more disgusted.

A friend I met in college came to visit. She told me about this program an old professor had contacted her about, and how excited she was to apply, and I could see my summer and ripe fruit and laughter in everything she said. Hers now, I guess. I watched her apply and get accepted and move back to that town and she has been there for a week now. Everything in me wants to feel good for her, but all I can muster is how bitter I feel that it is not me. If I had help, if I had someone to guide me, to work with me, maybe I could have done it. So, really, this must circle back to how utterly alone I feel all of the time.

I do have people. I have people who care and who are sweet and who are my dearest friends. But I am not looking for a friend – I am looking for a protector, an ambassador, someone who can give me something. I do not want to have to fend for it all. I feel an exhaustion so deep inside of myself that digging its roots out now would be impossible. So I am grossly jealous of the friend who has parents to help her, and a professor to write her a recommendation, and her own car and life and future. I just want it. A child reaching for someone else’s toy.

So now I am in a new apartment; cheaper, dirtier, in the hopes of saving some more money for that first fucking car that feels miles from me still. I have been promoted and I do not care. I will apply next year because I am determined to have it all sorted. I do not have another choice – to stay where I am now is death. But until then, I will have to wallow in my mediocrity and think of what could have been mine had I felt able to take it.

I have been gone for a while. It is simply because nothing that matters happens these days. I am mundane, here.

Until later,

G.D.

“And I know, none of this will matter in the long run // but I know a sound is still a sound around no one // and while I’m in this body // I want somebody to want // and I want what I want // and I want you to love me”

– Fiona Apple, I Want You To Love Me

Stuck in this cycle. Ups and downs, and I cannot make either of them last. I feel suspended in myself. The blows cannot sink me any lower if I never pick myself back up. If I do not allow myself to believe good things will happen, I will not be upset when they are only passing through. Every attempt is a waste. To muster up hope, as I have done these past few months, is confounding. I must learn to accept fact. There is nothing redeemable that I can offer to anyone, nothing purposeful I can provide, nothing I should expect in return.

But yet. There is this nasty, pathetic little thing in me that cries out still. To seek love is the natural human condition, but I must teach this thing that it is unnatural for me. It must be unnatural, because how can I offer everything that I have, more than I know I should, and it still not be enough for someone to want me? I want so often, so intensely, that everyone must, too. How can their want avoid me every single time? It seems so unlikely, so unlucky.

I do not think there can be anything casual about offering yourself to someone. I am somehow both so emotionally disconnected from it and so tuned in that I cannot stand it. Maybe because I cannot fathom that these emotions belong to me – I act on someone else’s will, someone else’s desire, because I cannot understand my own. I would like to. All that I seek now is a pure physical desire, for me to place my form in front of someone else and for them to want to do something to it. Love me, hurt me, dream of me, pretend with me. Anything at all. Anything. Can I be so hideous that no one will ever want me for the sake of wanting me? It brings that awful tightness to my throat to think of, but it must be true. I am living it over and over and over. To deny it would be sinful.

How silly I must look. Alone in my studio apartment, crumpled on the floor, hunched over my computer, unable to pull in a singular deep breath, telling this to the only thing I can. How do you bother the people you love with this? I want them to keep loving me, so I must offer it to you and hope that it will mean something. I’ve handed you an image of me on a silver platter. My legs are going numb in my efforts to bow to you. Trembling, pathetic. Horribly alone.

G.D.

“Anger is sadness that has had nowhere to go for a very long time.”

Unknown

I feel like I should be honest here, if nowhere else. I also feel like you, my dear friend, should know what you are getting into. Please do not look if you struggle to be kind to yourself – I know my thinking is wrong, disordered, and I wouldn’t wish it to spur anyone else’s.

I am quite unwell. I have spent a long time, a portion of it documented here, feeling uncertain of nearly every aspect of my life. I am uncertain of nothing now – I know that I am not enough. Or maybe I am too much, but when it boils down, does the distinction really matter? There is something in me that cannot mesh well with others. I am unhappy being myself, and I am unhappy changing myself to fit with what I think people want.

I’ve struggled with disordered eating for longer than I haven’t. It has always been painful in opposite directions, too much or not enough (how eerily familiar), and it has come back in full force this time. I am entirely convinced that this body, every inch of it, is uninhabitable and unlovable. Maybe not in that no one could love it, but in that I could never allow it. No one could convince me, not with words, with actions, with anything, that there is anything worth loving here. I have handed myself over to this hope and been destroyed by it. I cannot survive it again.

When I do not eat, it fills something else within me. It makes me feel like I am 11 again, 14 again, 19 again. I am in control of something when everything else is out of my hands. It is almost like sinking to the bottom of the pool. The blurred silence, the transcending of space, the warmth of the water holding you like the womb. There is something in this that I have known before, that is welcoming me back. I am sinking, but I am the water, too.

What of romance? A deathly craving. The sharp desire to be known and loved regardless of what they find. When this expectation is not met, the result is devastating. I feel as though I am spiraling out of myself. I can’t grab hold of anything. When I experienced my first real heartbreak as a teenager, the pain was so palpable that I could hold it in my hands and beat it to a pulp. I could feel so vividly, so immensely, that the overwhelming nature of it withered at the feet of my fire. But then I picked everything back up. I got older. I pushed all of the pieces back together and stapled the skin so that, hopefully, nothing would look out of place. To see it all come apart again was nothing like the first time. It was not a wild understanding of how humans were able to hurt each other. It was a reminder. It somehow hurts worse, this time.

I don’t know what to do with myself. I would do anything to escape this place, but there is nowhere to escape to.

Best wishes to you,

G.D.

“He is serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating round one; yes: in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down.”

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

As unfortunate as it is to admit, my intuition was right. It was foolish of me to have let someone in. They have done what I feared they would do, but the way in which it was done was infinitely worse than I could have imagined.

I have been thinking about the person who has wounded me so deeply. No need to mince words here or beat around the bush. I have been thinking about them in every way possible. I’ve thought about them in my apartment watching TV or falling asleep. I have thought about how they will never be in my apartment again. It is an incredibly strange mix of emotions I am experiencing. It is all of them together. I am unable to differentiate where love ends, hatred begins, anger comes in, sadness leaves. It has amalgamated into one beast that I feel, intensely, at all times. They show up in my dreams, but only in the mornings when I am already half awake. Any chance my consciousness gets to create them in my mind, it takes. It is exhausting to know that I am always feeling about them what they have not felt about me.

When I dream about them, it is always some version of the same thing – a place where they are sorry. I dream that they can love me how I need them to, that things are playful and good between us. A manifestation of that nasty, straggling hope inside of me that they will realize they do want to make things work, that I am worth something to them. While I know it cannot happen, and that even if they tried to make things right, the naïve, unabashed love I was able to feel for them could never exist again, I am desperate for it.

There is also some strange inkling within me that doesn’t seem to care. Perhaps it’s the bit that can’t muster up the energy for it anymore. That little part of me will hopefully get stronger with time. As of now, it is embryotic. Every day is passing by against my will. It feels cruel that the world can continue to go, go, go, while I am stuck here. I am being pulled to go, go, go anyways. I do not want to. I would like to wallow, but I have to cook my dinner and wake up to my alarm and smile at my coworkers and go, go, go.

It surprises me how normal I am able to act. Can anyone tell something is wrong with me? I don’t know what I crave more – for them to know, or for them to never be able to. It exhausts me so thoroughly to behave as if I am alright. By the time I arrive home, I cannot muster anything.

The apartment itself is a bit of a hellscape. I have only ever known it as a place where we loved each other. To be here on my own has filled everything with strangling emptiness. Our pictures are no longer on the walls, their keepsakes are packed away in a box. It is like they were never here.

The emotion that is perhaps the most surprising to me is the betrayal. Partially a betrayal on their part, but overwhelmingly a betrayal of myself. As I reflect on the relationship, I watch myself in horror as I do what I have always done and had promised to never do again: I molded myself for what they could give to me. I settled for the way that they spoke to me, or more truthfully, rarely spoke to me. I decided it would have to be okay that they did not initiate, that I would say “I love you” and they could never manage to say it back with any degree of seriousness. That I was envisioning a future with them that they had no interest in with me, and that even though I could see that through the thin veil of attention they had to force themselves to give me, I would always turn my head and smell the flowers. I was overwhelmed with how lucky I must have been to be loved at all. Was I?

I am embarrassed and ashamed. After all the work I thought I had done to be a better person for myself, it was thrown away as easily as it was envisioned.

G.D.

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”

Virginia Woolf

I haven’t come back here for a long while because I’ve been happy. Or maybe life has been happening too fast for me to think about unhappiness – no matter. When I’m happy, I don’t often feel the call to write. I want to be around friends and loved ones, cooking, reading, laughing. But when things begin to fall apart, it is a small solace to lock myself away with a place to put it all.

I’ve felt secure with someone. For the first time possibly ever, I have allowed myself to surge forward without hesitation. The fear has still been there, the worry, but the love has been so much stronger than that. It’s allowed me to acknowledge that both things can be true; I can be terrified to let someone love me while inviting it to exist.

Love has very nearly always been a black and white world for me. It has been love, and then it has been hate. Occasionally I have felt them at the same time, but they have always been oil and water. This time, something new has emerged. It is pitiful and sopping wet, shaking. Naked. Vulnerable. I am disgusted by it, even though it has come from me. Perhaps more so because it is born of my blood. I have let someone in, and they have seen me, and they have responded to it. It is as cold as it sounds. I want to kick the creature while it is down, let it cry my tears and dissolve itself from me.

My entire life I have felt as though there is too much within me. Too much feeling, too much reaction, too much me. I have yet to meet someone who makes me feel that this is untrue. It is almost as if loving me is enough to stave it off, until it isn’t. I’ll be bursting with it, with everything, and all it seems to take is one conversation to make me shove it all back in. I thought I was better, genuinely better, which makes this all the more bitter on my tongue.

To allow someone my physical self, the enormity of all that I am in someone else’s hand, has borne that pitiful creature. I have given myself over to people before and been scorned, and I can rationalize it now. It is the love that turns into hate. It is infinitely worse, it turns out, when it is no one’s fault. When you are hurt simply for the sake of being hurt, as it is the result of the way you both innately are.

How do you tell someone to see you differently? Do you beg, get down on your knees and offer everything you have, knowing that it would never make a difference? Do you disappear into yourself, hide anything that is too raw, knowing that it would never make a difference? Reconcile with the fact that there is nothing more you can do for reconciliation? I am exhausted.

I know that I am falling back into myself because I am here with you instead of in conversation about it. I do not want to talk about it. I do not want to fight, I do not want to force my point across, I do not want to create waves. I will hold my head under the surface instead and hold my breath for as long as I can, like I have always done. I’m scared, in the way that a child is scared, that I will always be me.

G.D.

“Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all.”

Oscar Wilde

I have a hard time discerning what is normal human behavior and what belongs to only me. Are these incredible moods my burden alone? I can go from hopeful to embarrassed by that very same hope so quickly, it astonishes me. I shock myself with the speed in which I turn against my own feelings.

It is as if I am incapable of enjoying simplicity. Nothing can ever be only pleasant. The sweetness becomes an overripe fruit, one that I hungrily gulped down as if compelled by some illusion. Now I can feel it, mushy between my teeth and under my fingernails, and I feel dirty, disgusted, desperate to separate myself from the version of me that swallowed it down willingly.

I suspect this to be self-sabotage, but I truly cannot tell what is real and what I have imagined. That is the ultimate trick with romance; the stakes are so high that you begin to doubt yourself, to doubt your own instincts. I am so intent on not ruining this, the one truly beautiful thing I have managed to weave together, that I am afraid to touch it. I want to leave it on a pedestal in its fresh-faced glory, overflowing with the giddy excitement new love exudes. If I touch it, I will disfigure it; it will become hideous in my image. That is the alternative trick with romance, I suppose. You damn yourself by leaving it alone, and you damn yourself by participation. I curse myself for creating this festering pit out of nothing. Maybe it would do me some good to get out of my head and into the reality of it all, but I wouldn’t even know how to start.

So many analogies. Not many of them good. But all of them painfully tangible.

Until next time,

G.D.

(p.s. – happy October.)

“It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire and ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

– Frank Zappa

It’s been years now since I’ve gone back to Florida. I used to go back every summer, after the initial move, but then I got defiant and wouldn’t get on the plane anymore. In my absence, I’ve been able to paint my hometown into some dreamy, distant place, even knowing that I hated every moment I spent there. I can see the beach, the water mirroring the sand and stretching further than I could see, even when I craned my childhood neck to try. The muggy heat and the melting ice cream. The powdery blue driveways that I skinned my knees on and the expansive chewed gum collection wrapped around our swing set’s pole. Nostalgia is going to kill me. I hate all of these things. I should hate all of these things. But when I close my eyes to look at them, she is there, too. Her bleach blonde hair, crunchy from the chlorine and frizzy from the thick air. Her plaid shorts and pink jelly sandals. Her crooked front teeth (she doesn’t care that they’re crooked, but everyone else does). I am horrified to see her because I know what is going to happen to her. I want to scoop her up and put her somewhere else, somewhere that cannot take from her her love of writing stories, riding a bike, eating when she is hungry. But all I can do is see her how she was, radiant in all of her loving sunlight, and be grateful that she existed at all.

When I last went back, I could barely walk right across the sand. My feet sank in at awkward angles and I got frustrated at the way it slowed me down, but then I thought about her laughing at how slow I was going and running across the sand like it was pavement, and then I was laughing, too. The girl that I spent every single day of my childhood with only to lose to distance started up an Etsy shop for her art. I ordered a t-shirt from it; her work was incredible. I wanted something of hers to be near me again. I totally forgot about it until she cancelled the order and I received an email about my refund. I don’t want a refund. I wanted the shirt. I wanted to have her back, to have me back, to be where we were before everything got ruined by everything. But then I thought about us laughing together on our bikes racing down the street of our oval neighborhood, and then I was laughing, too.

I know I cannot go back, and I know that the Florida I’ve made up in my nostalgia did not and never will exist. This does not change the fact that I would go back, though. I would do it all over again. Maybe I could save her this time around.

Until next time,

G.D.

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

The past month and a half of my life has perhaps been the most tumultuous period I have ever experienced. Beginning a new position that I am still unsure of accompanied with the stress of moving somewhere I’d scarcely imagined myself living has my head spinning incessantly. There doesn’t seem to be a moment to sit, to breathe, to think, to write, but I’ve done my absolute best.

I feel a loneliness I am unused to. I’m getting my first taste of living alone, and it is bitter. I assumed that I would love the freedom of no company, but the constant silence is suffocating. I feel like I’m slipping away from myself. I try to fill up as much of my time with other people as I possible can, but there is not a friend or a lover or a parent to be present in every viable moment. Eventually I will have to settle in and accept that it is just me here.

I am still optimistic about giving romance another shot. It does not come without its trials, primarily those I battle alone within my own head, but it is worth it insofar. My biggest hurdle is getting the terrible thoughts I plague myself with out of my mind and into the relationship for some sort of reassurance; I find it impossible to explain my feelings because they’re completely nonsensical. I know them, and they know me, and I should not worry about anything else. The distance is proving to be trickier than I expected it to. Having participated in a long-distance relationship before, I thought I would know exactly how this would feel. It is infinitely worse. Knowing that they are so close yet so distant leaves me craving them at odd hours, upset over nothing fixable. The next time that I see them, I will find it impossible to let them go and I will have to do it anyways.

Conquering my own impossible until the next time we speak,

G.D.

“I don’t know why I am the way I am / There’s something in the static / I think I’ve been having revelations”

‘not strong enough‘, boygenius

A million things have transpired since this March. I have graduated from college, found a new apartment that I will be moving into this week, and secured a job in a bigger city so that I may escape the monotony of a small life. Looking back at how harshly I have criticized myself, even on this page, makes me wince. I was unsure about what employment would look like for me, but I feel hopeful about the position I’ll be starting. Not only do I have exciting professional prospects ahead of me, but my personal life is slightly less in shambles than it has been previously. There are people who have removed themselves from my circle, and while it broke my heart to feel their absence, it has proved to be for the best. I feel a weight lifted off of me.

I’ve decided to give romance another try. I know I had put my foot down on it not being for me, but perhaps I was looking in the wrong places, searching for the wrong people. I think that I’ve found what I was looking for back then before throwing in the towel. I tend to overdramatize and get ahead of myself in a lot of situations, so I am attempting my best straight face about them so as not to scare them off. This is a strenuous balance between control and wanting them to see me for who I am; both are necessary, I believe, since I expect this to be long-term. It is deeply terrifying to find someone that makes you feel like the best version of yourself, that is beginning to heal something in you that you’d never realized needed healing. Due to distance and other uncertainties, I do not know where this will go, so I am trying to keep expectations low – this is perfectly impossible when you’ve found someone you would like to keep for as long as they’ll have you. Perhaps I will decide soon to throw away the caution I’ve been strangling and let myself feel more hopeful.

For now,

G.D.