Garbage Spew
2002-11-22 � 12:54 p.m.

I said I was a horrible person, and I meant it.

It's funny. I go through life, basically trying to mind my own business, really interacting with people very rarely and in mostly fairly superficial ways, and yet I seem to have this capacity, this knack for causing strife, discord and pain.

And when I actually interact with someone on a deeper, more personal level? Oh boy -- watch out. Blood will flow, tears will well up, the sky will fill with black clouds and thunder will crash as lightning rains down upon the earth.

I am not being melodramatic. Well okay, I am, but it's a fairly close approximation of the actual results.

I don't mean to do it...really, I don't. I'm just so fucked up that when I explode I take everyone else around with me. And it doesn't take hardly anything to set me off, either. A little opening up, a bit of emotional vulnerability, and I'm self-destructing almost immediately.

I have low self-esteem. I admit this about myself. It is tied into all my other weaknesses and neuroses, like my shallowness and my inability to experience any deep emotion save an overriding despair. It makes it so I can't accept that people value me -- makes me resent them telling me so, in fact. That resentment bubbles, feeds the self-hatred, and it all works together to make me a miserable little spot of meat and hair¹, unhappy with myself and a poke in the eye to whoever was unlucky enough to have been around me.

I'm sorry.

That's a blanket apology to all of you, but more so to some...and you know who you are.

I'm sorry for making you feel like I am worth some sort of effort. I'm sorry to have lead you to believe that being friends with me would be a rewarding and pleasant experience instead of the cruel hoax that it usually becomes. I'm sorry that I am so self-centered that I can't think about anything else but this nonsense. I'm sorry to have been an ass.

I almost got fired from my job today. Not because I don't do a good job (that's about the only thing that saved me -- that and the fact that for some strange reason, my boss is one of those poor souls that has come to like me), but because I didn't show up.

For days.

Over the last time period, I missed close to a third of my hours. (Next month's finances will be...interesting. Homemade Christmas presents for the fam, I suppose.) For many of those days, I didn't call, didn't write, didn't answer the phone, didn't even get out of bed.

I didn't really do much of anything, really.

It would be difficult to tell this from the entries I have made over the past month, I think. Which is sad, because I'm not sure when I quit writing what I felt here and instead started writing little notes and letters to some faceless crowd that the stats tracker says stop by, but I did. (My thoughts on why and how this works are as twisted and irrational as the rest of my reasoning processes.)

My boss told me today that I look like I've lost weight, which really scares the shit out of me, because I don't really have any to lose. I hadn't even thought about it, but I think he may be right. I don't eat very well, as I have often mentioned here.

My boss does know what's going on with me, as much as it is possible to know, but luckily the other co-workers do not. I don't think I could face them if they did. It's just so weak of me. They just think I have some sort of maniac flu thing. And it's pathetic that it makes me angry that they worry about me. And it does -- make me angry, I mean.

I am such a horrible person.

It's funny, kinda, this whole thing. This, this life I'm supposedly living here. What a fucking waste. I am a waste. I take up space. I breathe. Sometimes I sleep. And I have the nerve to complain about it all.

I look ahead of me, and I see nothing. Wait -- that's not precisely true. I don't even know how to look ahead. I can't. It's impossible for me to plan, to want. I hate how I am now, but I don't even want to change. I can't even project out a life for myself where I am any different. I have no goals. I have no dreams. I have no ambition. And I don't know how to get any.

At some point in time, when I was younger, I learned how to just quit worrying about this stuff. How to not think about it, how to just exist in the immediacy of the short-term, going from distraction to distraction.

The problem is that that doesn't really work anymore. Not really. Stuff eats at me, at a level just above the subconscious, and I get stressed, mean, angry...or more so. And suddenly it becomes clear that I stunted myself, mentally and emotionally, by doing this all these years, because I don't know how to look down the road, I only know how to stare down at my feet.

And so I'm stuck in this bubble of Now Time, fully cognizant that time is passing all around me and my life is floating away and that I'm not getting any better and am certainly getting worse, and I can't even make a plan on how to get better, because I can't even figure out how to want to.

So fucked up.

I thought that by starting to take some sort of medication again it would help kind of bootstrap me into a place where I could at least have a better chance of getting a handhold on myself and my life, but honestly, it hasn't helped all that much. I'm back to where I was at the beginning of August -- adrift, morose and apathetic to the point of destruction, hating myself, and that's all.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry to spew this out at you, whoever you are. Please be aware (if you actually read this far) that I am not soliciting sympathy here. Sympathy, empathy and kindness towards me really only rub salt in the wounds. Seriously.

I feel like I want to run away, but there's nowhere to run to. There's no place to go, no distraction to partake in, that will afford me the kind of disassociation with myself that I would require at this point. I don't know what to do.

Such an ugly, selfish little person I am.

I mean, really -- let's look at things. There are people out there who don't have the luxury to worry about crap like "I can't see a future for myself because I'm emotionally immature." They're out there thinking, "I hope I live to see tomorrow. I hope I have food to eat. I hope I can save my children. I hope I survive." And it doesn't even have to be that dramatic. A lady here at work has three (three!) giant tumors in her body -- she has to have a hysterectomy...and she's worried about me. There are even people who might read this that are busy dealing with serious drug addictions, the loss of a loved one, abuse, etc., and I'm being a whiney little scab.

Can't help it though. Can't. I mean, yeah -- I could lie some more, pretend some more, make a few more entries about how I went to such and such a show, how I saw such and such a movie, and did this or that trite and stupid thing. But why? That's almost as bad as what I'm doing now.

Besides whining, I don't really know what to do. Not that that's a change. I've never known what to do.

I stood in front of my closet this morning, trying to figure out what I was going to wear, and I just leaned forward and buried my head in the hanging clothes up to my neck. It was dark, it was muffled -- I liked it in there. That may have had something to do with the fact that I haven't slept in something like forty hours, but it's telling that the position that felt best to me was the same as an ostrich burying its head in the sand.

So again, I am sorry. I'm sorry you had to read this -- actually you didn't have to, but I know some of you did, and I'm sorry. When I say I am a horrible person, I don't mean that I am horrible to people (even though I am), but that I am horrible at being a person at all.

Yeah, I'm just a big fat ball of regret, I am.

-t

1 -- thanks to Zim for that nice description.

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