my pathetic weekend
self-loathingSomething has to change, seriously. My weekend was completely pathetic and I feel more alone every single fucking day. To top that all off, my workplace has been very unhappy with me, and the pressure is only growing despite my efforts. There’s active avoidance and cancellations, and I feel left in the dark almost intentionally, if not just out of interpersonal tensions. The paranoid side of me thinks this might be some longer play to sabotage my ability to perform and get me fired, but I don’t know. Also, I need the healthcare coverage, suicide is still blinking across my mind a little too frequently and it’s not like I’m a rich man. Fuck, man, I really hate life right now. I literally have nothing, I feel like some stranded man on an island digging through the ashes of a nearby exploding volcano looking for a lost radio or something. The tensions are reaching a breaking point and I might just go insane and explode.
Am I just one big cuck? Do people just see me as some useful idiot worker to slag off their shit on, only to be unhappy and disappointed later? Am I just incompetent and stupid? I grew up being known as a “smart kid”, but in a dumb setting, and in hindsight it’s clear how fraudulent that whole system is. You get labeled as “smart”, or “gifted”, which, thankfully I never really let go to my head (well, at least enough to be an asshole to others about it), and then what? I got to skip some classes, take some special ones, but I never developed any study habits, got my shit shellacked in college, and came out barely alive. And now that I’m here, everyone has already caught up, whoop-de-doo, it wasn’t about your education or “kid-smartness” at all, surprise surprise, it was just about information, access, resources, and how much your parents were able to go above and beyond. What a tremendous waste; I don’t like this deflating sense of self, especially at my age, it would’ve been better I’d been labeled “proficient enough” or something, so that there wasn’t this deferred realization that yes, indeed, YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL. So yes, work has been stressful, and it seems like everyone is more “on” it than I am, somehow, and between juggling the other side-gigs that I have — which, incidentally, I am majorly dropping the ball on now, too — I have no time for my soul, no time to recharge, and only time to jolt myself into labor with a little dose of prodrug amphetamine.
However, my emotional state and soul is increasingly on strike. I can’t tame it, I literally have little to no motivation to get started on the tasks at hand. It’s a slow-moving catastrophe and I feel like I’m just indifferently watching myself crash. Maybe I’ll feel something about it, and it’ll get me to somewhere “better”. Or maybe the world has already left me behind, and I’ve maxed out, and it will keep on accelerating further ahead of me in its psychotic crescendo of death as the pile of bones grows higher and higher. I’m just floating, floating in this shitty malfunctioning sensory deprivation chamber that only seems to let in the barbs of self-hatred, anxiety, depression, inadequacy, the whole boring gamut of millennial angst. Fuck me, can you please kill me?
Anyway, yeah, I feel grrreeeeaaaatt! Work is going terribly, so of course, it’s a terrible place and time to try and meet people or build rapport, and to add to that, I flirted with them the one time I did go out, granted it was like very late at night, and a Saturday night, and I think I was generally respectful, but still, it has made things awkward (or maybe it’s all in my head), and I feel like some slimy creep skeeve fuck that’s slinking around waiting to be found out. I should be fucking put down, really. But this guilt, is it really warranted? How is it so biblical in proportion? I think it’s just my anxiety and latent neurosis. I called them cute, asked one of them if they’d like to kiss, got turned down (smart girl) that’s it. And then I got super anxious, apologized, they told me we’re “totally” good, and here I am still beating myself up about it. It’s because I have a ruinous sinful streak in me and that I deserve to be punished, my superego is so large and weighty and it’s hounding me day and night, like I’m some filthy devil. Where did this sense of guilt come from? Maybe I’m a Judeo-Christian after all, it’s so Western of me, to feel this so acutely, to want to absolve myself of whatever inherent sin by punishing myself enough. When did my conscience become so guilt-ridden? I remember praying to God for forgiveness the first time I masturbated, promising Him that I wouldn’t do it again, and failing, and failing again. In retrospect it’s honestly hilarious, but I knew even then there was something deeply shameful about the genitals, lust, sexuality. My parents never spoke about it, which by omission lent that guilt its substantiality. Guilt, what a powerful, powerful thing, and maybe that’s the germ of it: sex. But, I think Freud was right, and it goes back even further than that, tangled up in some attempt to not get caught by your parents, caught lying, throwing away food you didn’t want to eat, whatever. And so guilt is inextricably bound to secret knowledge that you have, knowledge that you’re terrified will be divulged, but paradoxically you want divulged so that you’re finally free of its terror.
And so we have the Catholic practice of confession to ease the weight, to excrete the poison onto some other imaginary Other, who by their intrinsic virtue and goodness, will be able to hold this knowledge for you without the same torment that hounds you. Do we have confession now? What is secular confession? I guess we have social media, blogs, this bit of writing, but I don’t think it’s the same — confession requires an audience, or at least a virtuous Other who willingly takes on this burden, and I don’t know if we’re listening to each other anymore. So we accumulate this guilt inside, attempt to confess, but then find it reflects back onto us, and before we know it we’re drowning in our own sin. The therapist wasn’t really listening, they were looking at their calendar trying to pencil you in for next week — in, out, oh that’s an interesting point, can you talk more on that, blah blah, oh I have a client at 6 pm, see you next week — the virtuous Other has become the professionalized craven Other, driven by pecuniary interests, and you bask in their halo of Benjamins.
So, aside from my anxieties around poisoning the work well, and having burnt some bridges by confessing feelings (but not really feelings, more like impulsive fleeting at-the-time serotonin syndrome-induced attraction during a weak and very vulnerable post-breakup moment), I have nothing. I have a very small smattering of acquaintances here, who’ve somehow found their way and have found their groove, probably helped by the fact that: 1. they’re reasonably well-adjusted people, with no sick fantasies, who draw people to themselves by virtue of being “normal”, “positive”, “grounded”, and in general attract social energy in a way that I feel like I’ve been repelling lately (or maybe all my life!), 2. they’ve been out here for a long while, or are originally from the east coast, 3. or are almost-married, have kids, are at an almost entirely different stage of life than me, some newly-single, pathetic 30 year old talentless dilettante with delusions of grandeur.
It got unbearable this weekend, so Friday, I drank alone, smoked, and went to a show, by myself, and sheesh, it was filled with like 20-somethings fresh out of college. I listened to the artist before going and didn’t think it was some super Zoomer-esque show, but I guess I was wrong. I literally got into the club and left within 20 minutes, ate some Mexican food, and threw up. Perfect. Isn’t that great? The next day I moped, literally all day, and then painted a bit for the first time. I’m no good with oil paint, and I’m a talentless fuck, but it’s nice to do something tactile and try to excrete and sublimate some of that poison into another form. Here I am today, healthier, but also fatter, having gone for a run, done a little work that I’m sure will be unappreciated or dismissed as useless or “out of the loop”, and writing this post. I tried, and maybe the pain of loneliness is a good thing; it forces you to find ways to make a change, for your own sanity, and overwhelms the disappointment of these experiences, and forces you to keep searching, switching things up like a damn fool, whatever. I know it’s bad because I’m laughing extra hard at movies, stupid stupid movies like Crazy, Stupid, Love, because I’m so achingly lonely that these dead anachronous moving images of real people interacting and socializing and living their life tricks my animal brain into thinking for a little while that I’m somehow a part of what’s going on onscreen, too, and that my laugh will somehow register with these fictional characters, and that after hearing said laugh, they’ll invite me over for some beers, for a BBQ, to hang at the park, for some idle do-nothing hangout, simply because they like me, nothing else to it. God help me, and forgive me, as I try to get myself out of the well.
I’ve been listening to Cat Power and her cover of Sea of Love has been making me feel some type of way.