Author and Columnist
I have been depressed for the past several days. No, not sad. Not upset. Depressed.
One, you are upset. Despondent by the situation into which you keep diving headfirst. Not depressed.
Two, you get clinically depressed and do not let yourself accept when it is so--correctly naming is a crucial first step of getting ahold of your mental health.
These entries demonstrate the symptoms of your depression but your obsession. Not with a person, necessarily or usually. You are not obsessed with Kate, though someone brushing against these entries might think otherwise. You are obsessed with the situation, puzzling out solutions and tracing a thousand possibilities until you are miserable. It could be most anything that got under your skin enough.
This isn't about Kate qua Kate. It is about the fact that you hooked up with you, things between the two of you made you think there might be more, and she again spurned you. You feel rejected and dirtied, used by someone who you thought should have cared enough not to do that again.
Last night I chose to inform Kate of what I am going through, principally as it was concerned with her. With us.
Don't. There is no "us." There is Kate, and there is you.
You should not talk to Kate at all, but never about this. It helps nothing.
Obviously it was not best to have done so when I was experiencing acute depression, no matter how much I felt she was the cause.
You are the cause. She is the trigger. These are worlds apart.
And you are fixated and spiraling.
Yet I did because I was perpetually on the brink of bursting into tears and my mind wanted nothing more than to talk to Kate so she could tell me it was all okay.
That's not her job. Even when she was your girlfriend, it was not her job.
Your mind is seeking a balm that her words, no matter how flattering they might seem at first blush, are incapable of providing. You need medication to right your chemicals and a competent therapist to help you sort from there. You will get neither of these things, relying instead on a public journal.
Kate is a conditioned response. This is why I want only to hold her and kiss her when I am around her. The sight of her, the scent of her... it used to mean I was with the woman I love and the response hasn't altered yet.
So, alter it. It's far from impossible to change a conditioned response when one wants to, only you don't want to.
If you only like her when she is in your arms or on the phone, you don't honestly like her.
But more so, for years, whenever I had a bruise of the ego or a scrape of the heart, it was her to whom I ran.
It is not right to lay all your emotional labor on your partner, but you are too young to get that yet. You don't even have the vocabulary for it.
She no longer can, nor does she want to, especially when I think she is the source. That is only fair.
That sounds like the beginning of maturity; only I do not yet trust your revelations to be anything more than written lip service to cushion how unseemly your involvement with Kate persists in being.
For much of today, I was going to try to cease my friendship with Kate because I frankly cannot endure her for much of the time.
Yes! Finally, you are listening to me and severing your...
Wait. "For much of today"? No! All of today! All of this week, month, season. (I acknowledge again that she would have been worth knowing after you thoroughly detoxed for her and accepted that she was gone.)
Stop buzzing around Kate. Don't go back on it.
If she can cut off a happy romance after over two years to protect herself from pain and to more greatly be herself, is it so wrong of me to do the same with a very painful friendship?
No, it is not at all. You need space from her. You didn't even get it when she was in another country, possibly but not definitely canoodling with other boys.
She even says she isn't particularly sure I am even a very close friend of hers. She doesn't have or want a best friend and even if she did, it wouldn't be me.
You are both cowards lashing out at one another. She is egging you into showing backbone enough to be done with her.
She would not tell JB that they were not best friends; she has best friends. You are not one she can let herself want when you act like this. I doubt many of the other guys around her throw fits after orgasms or want to tie her down.
What she wants is someone she can "cuddle" with but still feel completely alone.
I assure you, an attractive, clever, sexually available, relationship-averse woman like Kate with a whole household of boys who want to (and do) get into her pants is not lacking for those.
She expounded on how unattractive I am to her because of this. She does objectify me, seeing me as a symbol for "ex-boyfriend," "history," "Old Kate," "commitment."
So go. Be rid of her. You aren't friends.
Increasingly, she is adopting the role Jen once occupied in my mind.
If I were not you, I might be forced to punch you for this. You will torture yourself enough, though. I know that keenly.
You bemoan objectification -- which Kate is doing -- and then identify precisely the object Kate is to you.
Kate is throwing nonexistent men in my face and telling me how unappealing I am to her, a sometimes clingy ex-boyfriend.
The power of your denial is intense. Surely you must know that these men are not nonexistent. She throws them in your face because she thinks the truth will keep you at bay, though she isn't willing to give you the merciful stab through the chest and confirm that she is thoroughly enjoying her college experience without you. In college, she does things with other men far beyond what she would have even considered with you.
And you are worse than clingy.
I want to cut her out of my life and forget how much I love(d) her.
So do it. Who would stop you?
To not think whose bed she is sharing this week. I do believe she is as chaste as she says, myself excluded.
No. Do you really think this? It doesn't seem possible that you do.
She was sexually repressed for most of her life, however, and finally healed that in September. Now she is surrounded by "hook-up" oriented people in an environment where anonymous, random, one-night stands are the item du jour and she doesn't seem to know who she fully is.
Huh. So, in September, a sexually repressed girl raised by Catholic parents "healed" from sexual trauma and dumped you in October, immediately after getting on the pill?
I know math was never your strong suit but come on.
I do worry for her, knowing what she went through.
Don't worry for her, as you only mean that you want her to do what you wish and be like you are.
So she wants to be alone, she should damned well be alone, not having empty interactions with faceless boys... so says the boy she only dated in hopes she could have a fling and toss him to the curb.
You don't get to make that call. She can do as she pleases, and she does. Even you were just another hookup.
She is not really the issue and, were she, it has been well covered in this journal.
Really? Because it seems like you keep making her the issue.
But, as I said, you are given to pathological fixation, a symptom of your anxiety.
I am very, very hurt by her, which is why I am writing this.
You are hurt by yourself. A woman who rounded the bases with you would rather play different games with other teams. It is your thoughts and reactions that are making this hard. Is Kate her best in this? Of course not. She is being cruel to you to establish space and boundaries because she doesn't yet know a better way of handling you, but you are the one letting her. Telling her that you are done talking to her and hanging up the phone would have resolved so many issues between you two. You don't need to put up with her, and having her in your life does not make it better.
When I think of the chances you passed up because you still wanted to keep space open in your bed for Kate, it nearly brings my blood to boil.
I would like to say I could remain her friend, that I want to. At a certain point, I have to be selfish.
So be selfish in a healthier way. You are overdue. Take care of yourself without her name passing your lips or being tapped on keys -- which would be better for me right now, as I find you exhausting but have endeavored to make these replies.
She is not there for me. She does not want to be and she should not be.
Correct. She may love you, but she does not at all like you. Can you blame her when you flail every time you smell Pantene shampoo?
You would not have hooked up with an ex to be brutal to them when they willfully misunderstood again but try to picture this from Kate's perspective. You are obnoxious to her. I don't want to imagine how she must have spoken to her friends and bedmates about you.
Kate deserves to be my friend because I do remember who she was and how it pertains to who she is now.
She does not deserve your friendship. She must earn it, and you must earn your role in her life without her claiming you as a bodily sacrifice.
I think she needs that, whether she knows it or not right now.
Shall we again sing the chorus that you do not get to dictate what Kate needs?
Do I need that? Do I need her?
No and no.
If nothing else, responding to you has been a humbling experience. It is human nature to paint a suffuse golden halo around one's past, better to justify who one is now and the decisions that preceded this iteration. The version of oneself in memory tends to be a touch brighter, cleverer, and stronger than the truth.
You, my dear boy, contain flaws I could not have remembered accurately. At present, they center around Kate, but she is the catalyst and not the source; if it were not Kate, it would be someone or something else and will be in time.
I am not immune to seeing your virtues -- that you have been gutsy enough to put this all down is a testament both to flaw and virtue -- but I don't see the point in ruffling your head and calling you a scamp.
Ditch Kate utterly, and I promise to buy you an ice cream cone, bucko.