sonnets shouldn't be so damned one-sided / my heart is a great big hole
well, something has happened to me.
depression has turned into obsession. words are swirling through and spilling out of my head in what i would probably describe as mania. if i'm not silently monologuing a blog post, i'm frantically writing a poem, or having a fake conversation with my coworkers, sometimes out loud, or frantically writing a poem about having fake conversations with my coworkers, sometimes out loud. by accident. in public. or else i’m rifling through a series of embarrassing memories, mostly to do with past coworkers, which make me cringe so hard my head hurts. the memories are connected to the writing and rehearsing because it's all a performance. i’m getting off on the performance of Please Like Me, and it’s a dark carousel, and i can’t get OFF. and the more scripted the performance, the worse the reviews!!!! #mixedmetaphors
(i always, always open my calculator app instead of the voice memos.)
i take up too much space in the room. my new job is 3 tiny rooms glued together with too many people in them, and they're always trying to usher everyone out. i don't know how to leave. i linger. it takes SO much effort to be ready, to be switched on, to have perfect ramrod posture and awareness of my angles for 6 hours, and then i’m just supposed to switch everything off and GO? when i talk to either of my two bosses i am overly formal, overly anxious, overly present. my work crushes seem to be uncomfortable with my apparently blatant interest. the one i was attracted to because of their sunny warm glow became suddenly and very pointedly cold. i'm too big. my feelings are too big, my needs are too big, my desire is so big it wants to swallow up the whole world like a mythical whale.
"my heart is a great big hole that wants to swallow everything up," i just noticed i wrote in my notes app 7 days ago.
the thing about it is that i can see that i'm being crazy. i can see that none of this is necessary, and that it's actually harmful, but being aware of it doesn't mean i can stop doing it. i would give ANYTHING to be able to turn my brain off. i just don't want it to be off all the time :( (aka, how i’ve heard anxiety meds described.)
i think the obvious answer is meditation so i'm going to meditate right now.
okay cool
something like this always happens when i join a new group—a new school, a new workplace, anything that could potentially be a built-in social structure. i always get either really excited or really bummed out by my social prospects, and then start to obsessively analyze my place within the group and how to do everything right and how to avoid everything i could do wrong. because i'm so used to doing things that feel right and then finding out that they were wrong. so i feel like i have to get ahead of that by catching every possible opportunity for misbehavior before it can happen, but then the obsessive catching/monitoring becomes the misbehavior that makes people uncomfortable. catch-22 by joseph heller. (will someone PLEASE start a literary trivia night so i can FINALLY let my light shine.) "chill out," they all say. but if i chill out i get in trouble, so what then.
and, without fail, my brain always selects someone to have a crush on, whether or not they are worthy of my attention, and because of my need for enough dopamine to propel myself through the classes or shifts or whatever i fixate on this crush or crushes so intensely that they become the first thing i think about in the morning and the last thing i think about at night, they come to me every few minutes throughout the day, i dream about them, i talk to them in my head, i look ahead at the schedule and memorize what time they'll be coming in, and whatever cute or funny or arousing interaction we had at the start gets drowned out by my tension & posturing & desperate need. and for the most part, nothing can ever be stated upfront because other people hate that. and then once i've dropped out of school or gotten fired, this person fades from my memory and i realize they were never anything special or even possibly repugnant and i was a victim of circumstance, believing more strongly in my environment than in my own deepest truths. and i'm now so aware of this pattern that it's even more maddening that i can't seem to do anything to change it. my current work crush has a kind of weird face and a pot belly and says sort of misogynistic things sometimes, and it just makes me like him more. and i don't understand!
okay. it's because it's not about him and his attributes. it's about me, and how he might respond to MY attributes. and if he's misogynistic, that's just a challenge. and if he's ugly, then that's a leg up.
my poor little wounded ego.
i really should be talking to my therapist about all of this but i haven't been able to afford therapy for many months. and even in that scenario, i managed to do the same thing. i very quickly developed a crush on her, and for a while could only orgasm by imagining sitting on her face. not ideal for your internal dynamic with your therapist, but the fact that it was wrong made it even more inevitable.
thankfully, unlike my two work crushes, my therapist seems to understand and even enjoy my secret longing. she’s definitely smart enough to have picked up on it. we've never discussed whether or not she's queer, but we sit there and beam at each other a lot. and i really, that's like, i don't know. that one feels safe. that one feels like i can't do anything wrong. as long as i don't address what's really happening, you know, for legal reasons. ("keep it inside," says the whole world. "too bad i have a BLOG," i reply. "YOUR MOVE.")
shit, i just realized i might want to show said blog to my therapist someday. oh well. probably shouldn't anyway.
well, once again writing all this out (as well as periodically sipping on the fantastic book i’m reading) has left me with a profound sense of peace, of being emptied. thank god. and thank you too, reader, for witnessing my redemption.
the book is The Accidental by Ali Smith. hopefully i will have time to gush about it here soon. here's a quote from it that i just read:
"Astrid isn't totally broken yet. But if a window could throw a brick at itself to test itself that's what she'll do, she'll break herself, Magnus thinks, then she'll test how sharp she is by using her own broken pieces on herself."
(Astrid is a twelve year old girl acting "adolescently" and Magnus is her older brother so this isn't some cheesy quote about falling in love with a wounded bird or anything.)
here's another one:
But sonnets shouldn't be so damned one-sided.
They implied, at least, dialogue. He found that
no one spoke back. No one. Michael persuaded,
argued with, no one but himself, looked round at
a family that wasn't his and saw
a lot of faded colour, then he sat
in his car, stared at an empty field, raw,
stony, bleached, like he was; sat in the heat
watching it dry up. He was such a sucker.
He knew her turn of head, her hands, her laughter.
He realized that he would never fuck her.
He realized that he would never have her.
He was a very ordinary bloke.
He turned from sand to glass and then he broke.