A Dark Night of the Soul

This was originally written on June 1st, in the wee hours of the morning:

I'm having a rough night. I'm also a bit drunk. It was karaoke night tonight at the local tavern, which is a fun event for going out with all the people I work with and I was totally psyched to go, and then when I was there I just felt really kind of left out. I mean, not like anyone intentionally left me out, I just felt like I didn't belong. Sometimes, I'm around people and I just wonder if I'm from a different species (in fact a few days ago while walking home I just started thinking about what if I'm an alien, not like for serious, but just feeling that degree of outsiderness). I've been a bit melancholic lately anyway.

So I was there at karaoke and I just started feeling terrible. I watched everyone else kinda being all huggy and touchy, sitting on each other and so forth and I just felt like, wow, I am so not part of this and I never will be. And the night before, I sort of felt the exact same way at a local dance. It's amazing to me, and I couldn't stop thinking about this at the bar tonight, how like, I'm ten years removed from the worst horrors of high school, yet in some ways I'm still there. Still the girl who sits alone, not out of choice, but because no one will sit with me. Still an outcast albino freak after all these years.

And it just made me wonder, when do those feelings end? Sometimes I feel like I never really get over anything. Does anyone? I can remember sitting with two friends during the end of my senior year of high school, hanging out in my room, reading over old notes we'd written to each other and laughing hysterically. I was pretty fresh from a breakkup and my friend Annmarie made me an award for getting over it so quickly, since we were all being so joyous and so carefree, unaffected by failed love. Even then, in between fits of giggles over those old notes we were reading, and in the midst of being proud of Annmarie's award and feeling like yeah, woo hoo, I'm over it, I'm moving on, some part of me knew I wasn't. I can just as easily recall when he wrote to me, "I don't love you anymore." Those words are hard to get over. And there are so many memories just as hard, if not harder. All the teasing, day in and day out, some of which I wrote about in that piece in Shark Reef, but you know, in that piece, I was aiming for the everyday stuff, so even that, as horrible as it was to write about, avoided some of the more extreme events. Like the time some kids stole the books from my locker and set them on fire. I didn't just feel left out then, I felt actively hated.

I just find it hard to put it behind me. I sometimes want so badly to be accepted, to be thought of as normal, as like other people, as belonging, and it's really hard with these memories still lingering somewhere underneath the surface of my skin. I take things really hard and I know it, what I don't know is how to forget, how to bounce back, how to live as if those things never happened, because all they do is make me want to shut down. There was one summer that I worked with this boy and totally had a thing for him, and we hung out all the time and had so much fun together and then when we got back to school in the fall he wouldn't even talk to me, and when a friend of mine told him that I liked him, he screamed "Ewwww!" Like I was a leper or something. How does a person, even years later, fully live as if something like that never happened? I haven't figured that out yet. And so far, down the line, any attempt at romance has kind of gone the same way.

For most of my early twenties I was in love with someone from the internet - it was a ridiculous situation in many ways and I feel kind of embarrassed about it now, but the feelings I had at the time were very real. I loved him with all my heart and I shared parts of myself with him that I had never shared with anyone and totally felt like he completely understood me, even the darker, heavier stuff, which was such an amazing feeling I hadn't really quite experienced before, and I just felt more connected to him than I ever had with anyone. I felt like I was totally seen and appreciated for who I really was, and that was new, and sacred. And in the end, he told me I wasn't his type, that he didn't love me (there's that line coming up again), and that he had gotten all sexual with some totally superficial girls we both knew.

Years have passed since all that, and I've tried six ways to Sunday to get past it all, and just this morning writing in my journal I realized the truth is, I'm just not. Even though I feel pretty removed from it all, every once in awhile I still wake up thinking about him. I wish I knew how to turn that switch off because every time it happens, I feel like an idiot. And it makes me sort of yearn for something I never really had anyway. Which in itself is pretty sad.

And then there was Mr. O - a legacy of hurt so thick I sometimes think I will never stop treading water trying to swim out of it. It was a weird situation where we ended up living together, in my apartment, and not having sex ever and not even sleeping together and never talking about our relationship or lack thereof and I used to wonder if he was messing around with someone else, and he always looked at porn online whenever I left the house and I felt more alone than I ever had felt by myself. I wish either of us had talked about things with the other. Thinking about it is making me cry pretty hard, I guess because it was like putting my soul through some sort of wringer, feeling constantly rejected, never knowing how to get out of this horrible pattern with him. I cried myself to sleep more often than not towards the end of things. But I didn't know how to say anything, for many reasons. And so not only did I feel abandoned and rejected by him, but more importantly, I was abandoning myself by not taking care of myself in the situation, and just continuing to stay in such horrible miserable circumstances.

Honestly when I think about it, my body still feels beyond exhausted just from holding all of that inside. I feel this is somehow "wrong" to say, but what bugged me the most was the sexual rejection and the lack of physical affection and closeness. Even as the months stretched on, it felt fresh every day. He would talk about every fucking girl on TV and make all these sexual comments and then sleep on my couch instead of in his bed with me. We were together for a year and a half, and this went on through most of it. You read and hear sometimes about couples who've been together forever and no longer get it on and I don't know how people do it. I mean, I think it could easily drive a person to madness. Sometimes I don't think there is any good way to describe in words how fucking painful it was, day in and day out, to love and want someone and want to be close to him and constantly be denied. It definitely had an effect on my self-esteem, on how I felt about myself as a woman. And I just didn't understand what the fuck happened, you know? He'd tell me he loved me, and then sleep on the floor. He'd talk to other girls on my phone, and I'd overhear comments like, "You want to marry me now, don't you?" joking, but still. Or one time I heard him tell one of his female friends that he was in love with another female friend's MySpace picture and go on and on about how hot it was. Sometimes he'd start fooling around with me, and get me all hot and bothered, and then go to bed, on the couch of course. That could incite a person to murder, let me tell you. I actually sort of wish it had. I mean not literally of course, but I wish I had gotten angry, but at the time all I could think was, "What? WHAT? What is it? What am I doing wrong?" and I'd go cry myself to sleep, alone, because I just couldn't figure any of it out. Sometimes he'd want to watch porn together and I wanted to ask him if he'd ask a starving person to watch a cooking show.

It felt like compounding interest, like all the feelings of sexual rejection and just being totally deprived of physical affection of any sort - it wasn't necessarily that I just wanted sex, but that I wanted something. Hand-holding, sitting together, cuddling, hugging, sleeping together, any sort of physical intimacy and closeness - just compounded and built up and got me at my core. It got to the point where I would consider something a good day if he was nice to me at all, if he didn't call those girls, if he came home drunk and semi-flirted with me (like, called me darling or something) or if we had a nice conversation about something, or one time we watched a movie together and our feet touched for a little bit, even though every day ended the same way, with us going to sleep separately, in different rooms. That's a definite sign of deprivation in a relationship, when horribly mediocre days seem so good in comparison to everything else. That relationship was like a mountain of hurt sitting on my heart, growing in mass with each new day. Like a cancerous tumor, metastasizing to my bloodstream and circulating through my veins.

I don't think I'm the same person I was before that relationship. Of course, hopefully, I've learned some things, but I mean on a deeper level. During so much of the time, I felt used. Mr O would talk me into going to the store to buy him beer or whatever, all the time, and I was taking care of all the bills, taking the dog on long walks so Mr O could be alone (and of course look at internet porn while I was out), shut myself up about my own opinions if I thought (or knew) he'd make fun of me for them, stopped doing the things I really loved, like reading and writing voraciously, because at its most basic, I just wasn't myself anymore.

The thing I feel the worst about in all that is that I stayed. For so long. I mean, what the fuck? What was I thinking? I guess I just wanted him to love me, or thought that if I could be more open and more affectionate, maybe things would get better. I totally thought it was my fault. I was convinced I had seriously disappointed him in bed and that's why all this shit ensued. I still kind of grapple with that feeling. I mean he was the first (and so far only) person I ever did have sex with. I also think I partly stayed because part of me thought there might not be anyone else. Mr O had been the first person to show interest in me in years and it was like, well shit, it may not come along again so might as well keep this one even if it's the most self-destructive thing I've ever done in my life.

I don't know if I had a point exactly in all of this, and if I did I've certainly lost it. I guess it's just that I've experienced what I'd consider some extreme wounding in the social and romantic arenas, and that all makes it that much harder to try to fit in, even now as an adult. I mean, it's like, I don't know how to sit with the fact that a kid once came towards me with a lighter and said, "I wonder if albinos burn like the rest of us," and then try to be normal in normal social situations now, even though it's years later. It's like those feelings of old are still in me.

I'm actually (surprise! surprise!) reminded of an episode of House from earlier this season. The patient was a kid with a very odd-looking face who's about to undergo surgery to change it and House says to him, "You can change your face, but you can't change who your face made you." And philosophically I could look at that statement and think about how maybe in some ways that's good, makes a person really unique. As a writer friend used to say, "Only the wounded are whole." And most of my favorite people (whether real life, fictional characters, famous people) are wounded in some way, kindred folk of some sort, and I can see how fucking special they are because of it, how sometimes going through something difficult or dealing with struggle can sometimes make a person more beautiful (and sometimes the opposite). So maybe in a twisted way there's some good to it. But man, it also sucks.

And tonight, being at karaoke just sort of brought it all home and for whatever reason, reminded me of high school dances, which is also how I felt last night at the local dance. I guess since I felt it in two places with different people, it's probably a lot more about me than the places or people. For whatever reason, this issue is surfacing for me. It's funny how the body can hold these feelings so strongly. I felt so socially awkward tonight, grotesquely different somehow. I know I'm not like other people, that I'm not typical, and a lot of times I like that. Other times, it's just really difficult. I just don't know how to fit in with all these touchy, flirty people, because I'm not really like that. It's like a language I can't speak. I feel like I'm darker somehow. A line I use often in my book is about feeling more "different on the inside" than I am on the outside. I mean, I had a really fucked up childhood and am pretty estranged from my family. There's sexual abuse in my history, I mean shit, that's fucking heavy! ometimes I think I picture everyone else as having a white picket fence life with perfectly functional families (which of course isn't the case) and I'm like the girl who lives in the sewer or something.

Actually, one of my favorite characters, Astrid from White Oleander, says it really well. I've had this page (and a few others) bookmarked for years (and am just now realizing some of the similarities in this passage I'm about to quote to the character of House): "I finished out the ninth grade at Madison Junior High, limping from class to class on my cane. My fractured hip was mending, but it was the slowest thing to heal. My shoulder was already functional, and even the chest wound that cracked my rib had stopped hurting every time I straightened or bent. But the hip was slow. I was always late to class. My days passed in a haze of Percodan. Bells and desks, shuffling to the next class. The teachers' mouths opened and butterflies flew out, too fast to capture. I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe seen a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?"

On a related note, I'd much rather get into a deep conversation about something, or read a book by myself, or devour knowledge on a wide array of subjects, or write in a journal or just sit around and space out and contemplate. It's funny because I can distinctly remember being eleven or so, laying in my bedroom at home (and thinking over math puzzles and books I'd read, memorizing things in my mind before bed and having lots of feelings about everything) that being smart and thinking a lot and feeling things really intensely might alienate me a lot. It's hard to know how to reconcile that, how to not like, pretend to be someone else (puke) in attempts to make people see me as "normal" or just embrace the alienation. That was another thing I struggled with HARD in my relationship with Mr O - this is retarded and I can't believe I'm even going to admit this, but when he and I used to watch Jeopardy together, I would fake not knowing the answers sometimes (and I'm no whiz at the show or anything) because if I got too many right he'd start putting me down. That felt really shitty. I'm never doing that again.

My friend Emily walked home with me from the bar and we talked a lot and I told her some of what I wrote on here and it was really good to have a friend to listen and understand. It's just that sometimes I get all weirded out by being in groups and feeling somehow like I'm sitting on the outside. For whatever reason, I'm really getting triggered into the past in the last few days.

It also made me consider, again, how my life right now isn't really working for me. I work at a job where pretty much everyone is seasonal. I have watched so many people come and go. And because I work in the kitchen, I'm separated from the environmental ed staff to a degree, which only increases that feeling of wow they're all bonded and close and I'm not part of it, that outsiderness I'm so weary from. It makes it really hard to make good connections with people around my age. I have some friends from here I will treasure forever, but for the most part people just always come and go all the time. So there's a lot of loss, getting to know people just before they leave, wishing I got to know people better beforehand, missed bonding opportunities, getting to know people and really like them and then saying goodbye, etc. I wish Emily (and some others) weren't leaving in two weeks.

I have to say though, that the thought of going back to school, moving to a new place, being around a whole bunch of nineteen-year-olds, really scares the shit out of me. I have a hard enough time fitting in with older people closer to my age. I sort of never flet like I really was nineteen or any of those ages, even when I was, so I can't really imagine trying to relate now. But I definitely do need to figure out something in the tangible, physical world, as I continue to try to let go of these old hurts in the emotional plane or assimilate them or come to terms or find some peace or whateverthefuck might help, because I feel kind of clearer every day that my life as it is right now isn't working for me and that I want to make some changes and move off the island (which is socially isolating in itself, big time) and venture out some.

After writing all that, I am essentially sober. And ready for bed.


Currently listening:
"Eon Blue Apocalypse/The Patient" - Tool - Okay, this is a little weird. I have almost 4000 songs on my iTunes/iPod, and tonight while walking home from work, this song (a live recording from a Tool show I saw in Seattle with Mr O) came on, and now here I am at my computer at home and the same song, out of all 4000, comes up again. There must be some cosmic message to the synchronicity, though I'm not sure what. A lot of times, I've kind of listened to this song to calm me, especially the repeating part, "I must keep reminding myself of this," which just started playing this very second. Maybe the only thing to remind myself of is another repeating lyric of the song, "Be patient." Hmmm.