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I worry that I come off as too rough with you, my tough love sounding like annoyance and snideness. You are making the wrong choices that form my regrets. If only you could hear my warnings, but of course, that is impossible. Time doesn't work that way, however psychic you wish to believe you are.
I would not want you to think that I do not like you. The trouble is that, beyond the obvious, I see too much of myself in you and resent it. I am burdened with the knowledge of what steps you could take to avoid disasters. At times, it pains me to see this. You are so blithe, stumbling toward errors that will twist scars in you that will I am still in the process of untangling.
I don't dislike you. I hope you can appreciate the difference.
I need to talk to someone, but I feel there is no one that really understands. They cannot possibly. So I will talk to you and maybe you will. If you do not, then you do not. This isn't for you, it never was.
This is essentially how you feel for the rest of your life. You want to confess yourself to someone in your life, but you do not think anyone will be able to handle it without judging you. In part, it is because you might judge the people in your life who open themselves up to you. You've well forged the chains you wear.
So, instead, you confess yourself to the anonymous internet because it is emotionally easier, and you do not have to see their eyes when they judge. I am not sure that you ever genuinely believe other people are reading these entries, but I am now.
In fact, I should be writing one right now on the Melian Dialogues, but I needed to talk far more than I needed to be a good student.
I respond here only to say that I have no memory of the Melian Dialogues and had to look them up, which did not stir my memory further. Post-secondary education did not always make the most significant impression on you because you did not want someone to try to teach you. It made you uneasy, and you found the assignments arbitrary.
You may not have been right on this point.
Every morning, I awaken to find this statically charged emptiness lying next to me. Before I could make it dissipate by filling it with images of likely femmes.
We are going to put aside your continued use of the word "femmes" when not preceding it with the adjective "violent."
What are my continued replies but my wondering how different your life would have been if you could have liberated yourself from the near-pathological need to be with a woman? It isn't horniness -- I could almost forgive that -- but feeling that you require a girlfriend to be complete. You fixate on this when you would be better served enjoying your life. You are young; there will be women enough -- and worthwhile ones -- once you are ready. You will find them by not looking, for the most part.
The vacuum has triumphed. It knows as well as I do, there is no one I am willing to let myself be with.
But you are desperately hungry for it. You are obsessed with an absence rather than radically accepting that it is so and moving on.
Worse, the hot spring of my psyche has chosen know to burble up the memory of the unbridled connection I shared with Kate over winter break. She was to me what no other could have been, could be. She filled a role that exists only for her, a vacancy that can never be filled.
Every love is unique and unrepeatable. Kate, however, and as I wish you knew better, is a song that ended months ago, and you hum tunelessly now.
I want to think -- and mostly do -- that you would have been less inclined to let your mind drift back to Kate -- toxic, lovely Kate -- if any of your other dates or dalliances had gone better. You would have thrown yourself more entirely into that relationship and used it as a reason to break further from Kate. I want to think you wouldn't linger in the past when you were slowly building a future with someone else.
I can think of at least one situation that proves otherwise, but there were extenuating circumstances, and it may not have been so otherwise.
This isn't romantic, though at the time it was for me. It was merely that she became again this person I was in heaven to be around. The interplay existed on all levels and we could barely stand not to be within inches of each other, if but for two precious nights.
I don't find it romantic. It's pathetic and regrettable to love a corpse.
There may have been times in higher realms with Kate, but I have lectured you about darker places you visited well before she dumped you. It was an imperfect relationship; even if it had been for a while, your best. Consciously ignoring that you had considered leaving her in the past (because she was a basket case, because you were) doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
I was speaking with Eileen tonight, lamenting that which I have described to you above, how I tried to make amends with Jen over winter break and failed,
I don't recall this attempt at amends, which seems like something important to the narrative. In a few years, there will be another conversation as you find out that Jen works at a jewelry store a block or so from your library job. That goes reasonably well, I believe, but it is not important.
Jen isn't your friend any longer. Maybe she wasn't ever really, compatible though you found yourselves in less mature days. You won't even fully release a woman who broke your heart by cheating on you with your supposed best friend. It would be best to let people exit your life and mind so new ones can enter.
(she told me that I had a great chance with her until I introduced Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, specifically identity versus identity confusion coming before intimacy versus isolation.
That scans. You are the sort of person who would talk yourself out of a promising romance by implicitly begging a high schooler to talk you out of your facile comprehension of community college psychology. If you had talked less, by hanging out more and actually kissing, the story might have been a more pleasant one.
No one finds me amazing. Well, that isn't exactly true. People tell me they think I am amazing. But they know that is what I want to hear and are telling me it to get into my good graces. I can tell and it means less than nothing to me.
I do not know how to properly convey to you that people you care about telling you that they think you are amazing means that they think you are amazing. The fact that you invalidate their experience is more than a little insulting. Why do you assume people saying nice things to you are lying? Is it because you do not think you are amazing? Because -- and I own my bias here -- you are someone worth talking to at a party. You only get more so.
You will suffer this desire for a critically long time, I am sorry to say. You surmount it not by someone telling you are terrific the correct number of times and the right way, but simply by being too busy with your life, filled with story-worthy ups and downs, to care what someone thinks of you.
I find few people amazing. And I let them know once I do.
I know you do, and you would be hurt if they doubted your sincerity. You are all heart and coziness when you like someone. You want to curl about their feet, feline, and gaze up in adoration with perhaps a few chirrups.
It seems once one knows that I find them completely different from every other person on earth, that I could sit on a grassy knoll and study them for weeks, they have no more interest in me. In confessing they have so affected me, I give away my intrigue. Perhaps they feel they have won me and I can henceforth be neglected as a former prize. This irks me to no end.
Well, if that isn't your abandonment issues, in a paragraph.
I wonder who you mean here, or is there someone?
I am not implying that people do not favor the chase and lose interest in the prize. I simply don't know if this is a reference to a specific person, and knowing this would allow me the context to give you better advice.
I'll level with you. I don't often feel loved or amazing. I feel lonely and wearisome. (Big shock.)
And allow me to level with you: You are a delight... except when you natter on about love in general and Kate in specific. You drive away those who may have found you excellent and who might have better comprised your friend group. You abandoned love for longing.
It was very laidback, but I was happy to be with someone I so loved (Yup, Conor, I love you. You are like a brother to me. So now you don't have to guess).
It has been well over a decade since I have heard word one from Conor. I expect that to continue to your deaths, though you will attend his funeral if he is the first to die.
The man you were loved the man he was, and I love that this happened. I do not love him. I do not know him.
Conor confessed that he had only spoken to one person on-line lately, but it was the most wonderful boy he knew. I began to say in earnest, "But, Conor, you talked to me last..." and it hit me. I think I must have glowed and I thanked him for the great compliment.
See, that's adorable. I want more of these experiences for you. You deserve love. But, again, it doesn't have to come from romantic partners.
Aside from the startlingly incapacitating hugs of Kei (Uh oh! I admitted someone else!), I get very little positive feedback.
I still love Kei. We don't keep in frequent contact -- she lives across the country -- but I feel a profound love for her to this day. She was and is a remarkable woman and a brilliant soul.
Also, an excellent hugger.
Maybe my love does make me weak. I'm not about to say something to saccharine trite as "but it is a great strength."
You should have. Love can make you strong when it is the right sort of love. Loving your wife gave you a new skeleton, one where you could stand up straight enough to look your problems in the eye and start to deal with them.
Loving people who do not and cannot love you makes you weak, but it is an understandable weakness. You want so badly to be loved that you try to give your love to people in hopes of tricking them into handing their own back. .
