jeez, louise

Hey everybody,

I know it’s been four months or so. I wish I could say my lacking comes from a place of emotional betterment or being really booked up but that just isn’t the case. It’s the opposite, I think. I don’t know why that has precluded me from hopping on here and expunging all the sick that’s been swirling, it just has. Like I have too much to say and nothing worth saying. I could recap everything, and I might, but I don’t know yet.

In terms of life, I live in Raleigh now. It’s cute enough and the food is good, but it doesn’t really feel like I live here because I’m not, y’know, living. I don’t do anything, really. And Tennessee was like this, too, a lot of keeping my head in my shell and calling it self-reflection. But there, it felt okay, it felt natural, it felt like what I was supposed to be doing following the last two years of my life. Move to a new city, become some same but better version of myself, reflect on Auburn in its entirety, make friends, etc. It felt like that first step into this next chapter of my life, so my expectations for it, they were light and patient. I could take my time to find out who I was divorced from the context of my friends, my familiar cities, my family, my ex, everything. Where I was situated was hopeful. But I wasn’t doing anything qualitatively different than I’m doing now, I was hardly more social or alive, but it felt okay to be that way there. And then I decided to move.

I can tell myself a thousand reasons why I did or didn’t want to do this. I wanted to move to a bigger city, one more conducive to finding a partner. I wanted to take a promotion and grow my professional skills. I wanted better food. But there was also this notion that the new job and new city being offered to me so soon after getting to Tennessee, it was a sign of something. And yeah, my job at Tennessee sucked a lot for sleep and I can’t forget that. But part of me felt like taking this job would be a do-over of the new city experience, I could replicate that optimism and patience for growth that I first felt in Tennessee here. That hasn’t proved to be the case. Of course, my ex also lives close-by, and that was a cage match of competing beliefs in my head. But I’ll get to that later, maybe.

I feel worse than I ever have ever since Knoxville. Part of that is this girl I was seeing at the tail end of Knoxville into moving here. In a word, the relationship was abusive, but it’s more complex than that. I think worse than getting slapped a couple times or bit until I bruised or screamed at was how much of myself I saw in her, or maybe how much I projected these qualities onto her. And in that relationship, I also saw the worst sides of myself, sides I didn’t know I possessed, or at least ones I had never been comfortable expressing. Yelling, name-calling, panic attacks and meltdowns and sobbing fits, I was doing a lot of it. I had never felt so stripped down and bare and raw, like I was burned all over and held under a hot shower. But I didn’t handle it the way I used to pride myself on and it showed me that what I had formerly thought were good qualities about me – being a good communicator, being even-keeled, not getting angry and hateful – those weren’t qualities I possessed. They were performances I put on. I learned that I can be just as callous and volatile as any person I had previously judged for having those qualities. Even now, I feel like all my bark is peeled off and I’m soft and defenseless, like all of my emotions will spill out of me at a moment’s notice. I feel like a child.

But what I saw in her were the things I never wanted to see in myself, or the things I had never evaluated about myself too deeply, or shoved really deep down, criticisms I had deflected. I’ll give an example about what I’m talking about. For instance, I recall Jane on multiple occasions talking about certain things – I had no career drive, I was a downer, only ever talking about how miserable I was, I twisted emotional conversations into solvable, actionable ones instead of listening to feelings. And for these, I chalked them up to personality differences, that those were parts of who I was and they didn’t need to be changed up very much and I resented her for seeing me in that way. Then, with Grace, I was on the other side of it. She was actively self-harming and suicidal, didn’t have a job or have the drive to get one, and conversing with her turned all of my emotions into defects. And I had always wondered how I could drive someone to cheat (this ex did it, too, so the fault probably does lie with me), but then I saw it with her. I felt so trapped and chained to her emotional state, finding myself both miserable with her and impossible to leave her, and so I looked for ways out. While we weren’t official, that’s an excuse, I texted other women and did everything I could to give myself a reason to get the fuck out. I realized pretty quick that this was a stupid endeavor and makes me a giga-hypocrite, but still. I did the same thing I crucified my ex for. Sure, the context is different, but the moral principle isn’t. I went back to trying to make things work. In some way, it felt like I was trying to prove a point to myself. If I can stay with her and fix things and it works out, then maybe Jane was wrong to have not done that for me. When I had that thought, I wanted to put my head in the oven, I tell you what. How indicative of who I’ve become, or have been all along.

Why did I stay? In all honesty, it felt good to be liked in a way that felt like I was being subsumed, like I was someone’s everything. It was a wonderful safety blanket over my shitty little heart. Of course, I realized pretty quick why sacrificing my emotional wellbeing for an ego boost is a really shitty trade deal. But there were times when I did feel that the emotional highs meant something, something about me containing qualities that were lovable and worth getting whipped into a frenzy for, something I had never quite felt. But at some point, I just had to acknowledge that I was actively hurting myself.

And all of this compounds with moving to this new city. I arrived here not with hopes for a new me but with the plea for a new one. I have never been a worse version of myself – perhaps I have never been more myself, more true to who I am. I don’t really know, it’s hard to extricate myself from what’s happened. And everything is all churned up now, I cry so much every day, I feel so much rage and regret and desire, and I don’t know what to do with any of it.

And of course, the confluence of everything has led me into thinking about Jane, missing her. And part of me acknowledges that I’m still not over it, that was made perfectly clear in my last relationship. And part of me acknowledges that I do not actually know how I feel about anything, that every major emotion I’m feeling is just as likely a prayer for relief. Maybe she was just the last time I felt at home. Maybe I still love her. Maybe having gone through one of the most emotionally tempestuous periods of my life has me thinking of calmer waters. None of it matters, of course, I know nothing about me is good for anyone else right now. I don’t know why I moved here, I should have known that it was going to aggravate things.

I’m doing okay, though. One thing I’ve learned, if nothing else, is that nothing will change by me bitching on the internet. I’m going to concerts, trying to sign up for classes at the community center, I’m going to try bars or maybe like a meet-up or rec league. I don’t know, it all feels cringe to me, but when the alternative is being alone in my apartment in a city that feels like a sandbag on my shoulders, I guess it’s not so bad. Ol’ Reliable, going on dates with girls and hoping they have cool friends and I can infiltrate that way, that’s just not a possibility right now. I’ve never had less desire to be intimate with anyone and while I know this isn’t permanent, it feels like it will stay a while. The whole ordeal feels like a skinned knee on the blacktop.

So yeah, whatever, who cares. Talk to you in another four months. By then I should know how to use a sewing machine and/or a clay wheel.