December « 2017 « Diary of a Prisoner

2017-12-19

Looking for darkness

Filed under: Blog — Tags: darkness, depression, loneliness, uselessness — Inmate #840528 @ 20:20

I came across this post on facebook, an image (I’m not even sure if that classifies as a meme) that just says:

I’m highly attracted to someone who has been through things in life. I don’t want someone who is always rainbows and butterflies. Is it strange that I am comforted by the darkness in someone?

It got me thinking. I am indeed sort of attracted to people who have a dark history and/or a dark side, whatever it may be, and people who are always happy kind of creep me out. I’ve always known this, though, so it’s nothing new. If anything, it was nice to see it show up on my feed because it’s a reminder that I’m not alone in my weirdness, and lately that alone is definitely a welcome thing.

The question however is: why? Why do I feel immediately close to someone who has lived through struggles? Until recently, I had never admitted to myself that perhaps I just wish someone were as miserable as me; and that still makes me feel horrible, by the way. But I guess hiding it doesn’t help anyone, so there it is again. Maybe this attraction to fellow strugglers is just another way of saying the same thing, in a slightly less selfish way because it’s about them, rather than me.

Note that, once again, this is not about love or romantic relationships. One of the very few “guy friends” I had also struggled through his own things, and that is actually what got us to be friends. There’s just that kind of connection between people who have or have had issues. Maybe it’s part selfishness: hey, I’m not as alone, as miserable, as ridiculous as I thought I was. Or maybe it’s the desire to help, though the line between generosity and selfishness can be thin: if I know that helping you makes me feel better, am I being self-centered? Still, there’s a connection.

Lately I’ve been following a facebook group about victims of abuse by sociopaths and narcissists. Even though many of the posts by others are heartbreaking, as one may imagine, the environment is very positive and supportive. I never posted there myself (I don’t feel my experiences are “worth” it; that’s a whole new can of worms, I know) but I’ve occasionally commented on other things, and I’ve had replies. That alone was helpful, especially when they were indeed supporting comments to things that took a lot of effort to write and put out there, such as my fear of driving issue.

In my life I’ve always been in touch with someone who had issues; perhaps it was a way of working on my own issues, who knows? Yet lately I haven’t, or rather, as I said in other posts, it feels like everyone’s sort of trying to find a way while I’m still locked in. The odd thing is that coming to the realization that perhaps I “used” other people’s issues to feel less alone doesn’t make me feel guilty. After all I wasn’t the one to cause their problems and I’ve always tried to help others. What it does, instead, is make me feel useless now, actually both useless and hopeless. Useless because I can’t help anyone, and hopeless because I feel like nobody will ever need me again, since everyone seems to be doing better on their own.

Comments (0)

2017-12-17

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Filed under: Blog — Tags: failure, friendship, paranoia — Inmate #840528 @ 11:41

In my previous post I mentioned how my mind sometimes races and paranoia kicks in, as it did on irc when I was being ignored. It went like this: on irc, each user has a counter called the idle time, which tells you how much time has elapsed since that user said anything to anyone. It normally doesn’t show unless you’re on the same server, but there’s a way to request that anyway (just running the whois command with the recipient mentioned twice). It often happened that I was talking with someone in private chat, and they stopped replying. After a while they would say they had to leave the computer, something pretty odd to begin with since at the time you were not always-on and you made the most out of each minute you stayed online given that you did indeed pay by the minute, and that’s why they had stopped talking. Except they were lying: looking at their idle time I could see very clearly that it continuously reset to very low values, meaning they were indeed talking, just ignoring me. I’m aware that it’s borderline paranoia, but is it really paranoia when it’s true?

That’s been the common thread in my life: being ignored and, pretty often, just dumped without a word or an explanation. That’s why I’m so insecure around people, that’s why I have a hard time believing in “forever”, or that I am interesting at all for anyone. Most of the times I am the one who has to seek out others even just for a hello, and trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried not looking for anyone for a few days and the truth is that nobody looks for me first, except in rare cases. And looking for those clues of being ignored, something that modern-day messaging platforms make very easy, literally too easy, by means of double checkmarks or “last online” notices that cannot be hidden, has almost turned into a form of psychological self-harm. But again, is it self-harm or is it just me trying to find anything that’s actually true and real in the midst of all the fakeness?

And so my mind starts racing. Yesterday that friend of mine stated she was on the train, and a story on instagram gave a clue that she was bound for the city where that guy is. Good for her if he’s good to her. And yet it hurts, and again it’s not jealousy. It’s that she’s got the guts to hop on a train that covers literally half the country, and I wasn’t able to make myself go to my old school for the orientation event (it would have been nice to see it again after so many years and I may have met someone there too). And the worst part is that our friendship is taking a toll. She doesn’t talk to me because she doesn’t want to hurt me with those things, which are indeed important to her; and I don’t talk to her for fear of saying anything that makes her say anything about that. And yesterday I saw she hadn’t used a messenger we use for hours, and I thought: she’s enjoying her time with him. And every time I opened instagram I was scared, and still am, to see something about them together, or hint that they spent the night together, sharing a kind of intimacy that I haven’t experienced in a long time. It’s like furiously running that double whois command on irc to see if I was being ignored; and the worst thing is that part of me clearly wants to be wrong, but part of me appreciates that I was right, even though it’s the worst outcome. At least I’m not completely wrong about everything, in a sense. But at what cost? What’s the advantage of being right about something painful?

And the really worst part is that it’s someone I care about, I truly do. And I hate feeling like this sort of ancestral resentment towards her because I’m supposed to be her friend, and I would like to be her friend. I’d like to be happy for her when she’s happy and support her when she’s not; and until recently I have sort of managed, but things took a turn for the worst recently for me and it turned into envy, something I absolutely hate myself for. She shouldn’t be losing a friend because that friend’s got his own issues. It’s unfair. And it makes me hate myself further.

How do I get out it?

Comments (1)

2017-12-11

It happened again

Filed under: Blog — Tags: anxiety, depression, failure, friends, friendship, loneliness — Inmate #840528 @ 01:35

I read that writing supposedly helps, that when you have a bad thought you should put it in writing as soon as you have it, so that your mind doesn’t sit on it and plays with it. I don’t know if that’s true because I do keep a list of things that happen to me during the day and I mark them as positive, negative or neutral (which really is neutral-negative, or rather: not great but didn’t actively bring me down, if that makes any sense), and it doesn’t really feel like it’s helping. But here we go anyway, let’s try this again. I suppose that having told a person or two about this blog sort of gives it a bit more of a purpose, since it doesn’t look like hordes of anonymous reads are flocking to it anyway. And what’s writing without an audience?

Anyway, it happened again today. That feeling of inadequacy and comparing myself to others. I cannot get into specifics for obvious reasons, but someone I mentioned before was out of town today, and that alone was enough to rekindle my feeling of being stuck. Here’s someone who just hops on a bus, or train, or whatever, and travels almost 400 km for the hell of it; and here I am, for whom going to the next town on a map to spend a few hours with a friend feels like a gargantuan accomplishment that requires hours, if not days, of mental planning. And then my mind started racing, much like it used to do back on irc when I was being ignored, which I’ll talk about at some point. I looked for this guy I know she’s getting involved with, and found him; he has photos with his girlfriend, whom he seldom mentioned to my friend, and on her profile (the girlfriend’s I mean) she has a photo of them together (with the guy) mentioning their “unengagement” party. My brain quickly put things together: they’re splitting up so he can get with my friend. And I’m happy for her, if he treats her well, except I can’t help being a little jealous, and just plain envious, I admit, because again I feel stuck while others do this sort of crazy thing. It looks like nobody can stay single for more than a month and I quit a sort-of-kind-of long-distance relationship almost two years ago and it still feels like yesterday. And the guy apparently got on the cover of a magazine for something, and is a skilled musician; all things I kind of dabble in but certainly am not magazine material. Not that I want to be, mind you, but I can’t help but compare myself to this person I don’t even know. And there’s another thing about him that made me uneasy but I just can’t say it; it’s nothing inherently wrong or bad, just something that may have an effect on my friend and, in a sense, spoil one thing we sort of playfully shared.

I’m fully aware that I have no rights on anything, but it’s that sense of betrayal, once again, amplified by the fact that it really looks like everyone claims to have love issues yet they all actively seek it, everyone claims to be sad yet everyone quickly gets over it, and so on; it’s as if nobody is really miserable, and as a consequence nobody understands my being so. We’ve already been over how badly and guilty I feel about feeling like that, so I won’t repeat myself. I know I’m a terrible person for even thinking anything along those lines. It’s not even about being single, mind you. Another good friend was lucky enough to meet a good person and it seems to be working out for her, I suppose, because I don’t ask about it lest it makes me feel like that again (and that in turn makes me feel like I’m a bad friend, once again), and it’s not like she was actively seeking love, assuming that it leads to that anyway, yet she did found someone.

That’s the issue with me. It’s not about being single. Every time I try to talk about this with someone, I fail to make this point and it just adds to the sense of feeling alone. I don’t think I’d be ready for a relationship, not a traditional one anyway, so that’s not what I’m looking for. My problem is that I feel like I have no chance of finding someone even if I wanted to. It’s not having the opportunity. And part of that is because of me not putting myself out there, true. But part of that is also because I am not attractive. And no, I don’t think that looks are necessarily the only thing, but they certainly do mean something. If you don’t like someone’s looks at all, it’s unlikely it’ll grow on you over time even if you like the person. Not impossible, but unlikely; especially if there is no physical attraction whatsoever. And I know I’m not attractive. I could lose some (quite a bit of) weight, and I just don’t like my looks; I was never the attractive one. I can’t recall a single person who had a crush on me in person. Online it’s sort of different, you get to know me for me first and foremost, but then the moment you meet me in person, it’s game over. I’m not saying I’m hideous. But I’m not anyone’s first choice. I suppose the only silver lining about the aforementioned friend is that this sort-of-unengaged guy is not particularly attractive, which I reckon may give me a sense of hope. But again, it’s not about finding love, not actually, not in practice. It’s about the chance. It’s about being denied a whole chunk of the human experience. And I know that a lot of this is my depression talking, and my anxiety, and maybe the memories from my childhood that my brain has conveniently stashed aside yet not that well. I hate myself for it because I know that most of this is in my head. I know it is. So I’m chubby, so I’m no Tom Cruise (or whomever women like nowadays), so I’m not good at playing Mozart on the piano. But I’m pretty much a normal guy. I think. Because as I was typing that, I wondered: is there anything really broken about me? And part of my mind thought: no, you’re overall pretty decent, you may a bit quirkier than average but it’s nothing earth-shattering. But another part went: are you kidding me? sit down because this will be a long list.

I just want the chance, really just the chance, to do normal things. Even suffer for someone, not because of someone. I keep mentioning couples because that’s the basis of human contact, in the end. I just wish I could get out of my shell and live life, be it good or bad. So far it’s only been bad, I look at my past and I only see negative experiences: with my family, with other people. I have very few good memories to hold on to, and my parents aren’t getting any younger. Besides them, I have nobody. That’s what’s making me feel worse and worse, subconsciously, I think. What’s the point of life if you’re alone? I wish I had a local friend to do silly things with, to just hang out with; I wish I could get myself to do it, especially, because once again I’m the barrier, the obstacle, the hindrance. I watch movies and see people doing things and it feels normal, and it feels nice; and then it’s over, and I feel empty and that’s because the illusion is over. Sometimes it comes apart sooner, sometimes characters get heartbroken over something or someone, and I realize I crave that pain. Anything, really, to feel alive, to get out of this stalemate with myself. I find myself easily moved; all it takes is a quote about life, or a personal story, or even a well-made tv commercial. But it’s not being moved out of beauty; it’s sadness for myself, as if I were mourning myself. And I know a lot about mourning, unfortunately. And that’s another thing that makes no sense, because I of all people should know better, I of all people should be aware that life doesn’t last forever and should take action before it’s too late. Why can’t I? What is wrong with me?

Maybe I should look into therapy, at least the chatty kind, not the druggy kind. But it’s logistically impossible for the time being, and to be completely honest it scares me. Because I have a hard time admitting certain things even to myself; especially digging into the past, it’s something I’ve always struggled with. I don’t even do that with the people I consider friends. Doing that with a stranger feels like a nightmare. And it’s expensive, and I don’t even know if there are good ones around here anyway. How do you even talk to a therapist about your innermost secrets, your most shameful thoughts, without feeling judged? How do you deal with making yourself so vulnerable? How can you even trust them, or anyone really, with certain things? And what if you spend thousands over years and it doesn’t help? At least writing here is free.

A few days ago I had a bit of a revelation about myself, but I think I was with someone else and couldn’t write it down. I can’t remember. Maybe it was a dream? I really can’t remember, I just had a sudden realization about one of the reasons I may be like this. Not that knowing the root cause necessarily helps, in fact it probably doesn’t because I’m pretty sure it’s rooted in my childhood so the only thing I can do is to accept it and move on anyway. But it made sense, and I even remember feeling like I was onto something. But I didn’t write it down, I didn’t take a note, and it just escaped me. I don’t even know if it happened, if I actually did have this enlightenment moment, or just somehow fabricated a memory of it. See, sometimes I manage to gaslight myself.

But that’s the problem, overall. There is no direct solution. And talking to people doesn’t help, and I got to the point where I don’t even want to. It just feels pointless, and they want to help, and yet can’t, so they feel bad and I feel guilty. Even worse, as I said, I can’t even explain myself. I don’t know how to put it into words that it’s not a matter of being single, it’s a matter of not having any self-esteem, of not seeing anything worthy about myself, so that nobody, be it a potential partner or just about anyone really, would have any interest in me whatsoever. If I feel like I have nothing to offer to anyone, or that I am flat-out a complete failure as a human being, how can I expect anyone to want anything to do with me?