Author and Columnist
I feel that I suck as a human being because I rarely wake up before noon now. I stayed up until nearly four last night figuring out enough java to put lightning on the main page.
You are just twenty. It doesn't make you suck as a human.
However, trying to put lightning on a webpage is at least gauche.
What does my life amount to these days?
I've excised your specific examples. These are almost unimportant to your ennui. We can deal in particulars. The computer -- outside of writing -- is an impediment. I know this because it is to me. It is too simple to consume passively. Reading a book is a different mental experience than reading a fluffy website.
Connecting with people is always your balm, but you only do it of late when Emily wants you to. You should not depend on her for socializing, especially as your limerence is fading.
Perhaps I need a job, if only for the impetus to leave the house and computer and venture into the real world.
With the addition of money, which gives you a sense of freedom, you hit the mark.
I am taking a moratorium on real life this week. M has gone to Maryland to participate in Free Spirit, so she shall not lure me from my cave. But, frankly, as my grandmother's funeral is Friday
I hope you do not think I am too hard on you. Though you are not fully processing what you are going through, writing this eases your strain. You need rest, but do not let it manifest into outright depression.
I sleep a great deal now. It affords me a certain escape I lack in my life.
I wish you wouldn't. Your life -- absent the loss of grandmother, job, and singledom -- is not something you should want to escape. I would love to step in there for a little while, be a tourist in the world you wish so much to avoid facing.
The other dream I remember was that I was helping out at a vast magick store.
I am commenting here and not picking out the details because I still remember this dream. Much of what happened to you has been left by the wayside of memory, but this is still lodged somewhere.
I spent most of the day cleaning out my soon-to-be bedroom.
The less time you spend sharing a room with Bryan, the better. I am sure he would agree, though you did resent that you had to abandon the bigger bedroom to him because he has so egregiously trashed it that your parents argued it was easier just to let him have it.
Sarah wrote me, much to my delight. She truly is an immensely important person in my life. Without her, I would know so much less about myself than I do.
What do you know about yourself because of Sarah that could not be summed up with "You are easily led by hippie women who can sing"?
I am not discounting her value as a person, only how you react to her as some guru because you want to hop into bed with her.
It was hard at first to be in this relationship, as wonderful as Emily was and is for the incredibly hard to admit fact that I have a very intense love for both Sarah and Kate.
Revolutionary thought: Don't be in a relationship until you are ready to be. Neither Kate nor Sarah are the answer to this, though you perceive what you presently feel about them as love.
(When you feel genuine and complete love -- and it won't be for a while -- your fixation on these young women will seem embarrassing.)
That, entirely, was why I was having a problem with my relationship with M.
And because you do not want to be her boyfriend, fond though you are at times and despite her being intelligent and funny.
Also, because you want to be single right now. Not so you can hook up with young women -- though also that. You want to be the captain of your life rather than following the woman in your bed, which is unfortunately your inclination.
In fact, I didn't fall in love with Sarah, amazing and wonderful as she is, until a year after meeting her.
Oh, let's be frank here. You "fell in love" with Sarah because she hit some growth spurt and became overtly sexy. She was the same Sarah she had been. The only difference was that she posted the late nineties alt scene equivalent of thirst trap pictures on her blog.
it eventually dawned on me that I felt exactly like this when I started going out with Kate. It took me a while to warm to the thought of her being a part of my life.
I have dealt with your being closer to experiences than I am, and I should trust your memories more than mine.
I don't fully believe you here.
Kate was erratic when you started dating. She did drugs (not constantly, but to a reasonable degree). She tried to escape her parents. She smoked. Maybe you resisted her a little, but it was not like how you are with Emily.
You do push back against romantic relationships at first. I have, too. Even months after moving in with the woman who became my wife, I was uncomfortable with how much she seemed to love me. I couldn't point out what about her made me feel this way. In a sense, I loved her so much that I didn't want her to love me. I felt terrible for her that I had somehow duped her into this.
Do you know what this was? Mental illness. Clinical, diagnosable mental illness. A prescription and someone outside the situation to whom I could have talked would have saved me grief.
I can't tell you either when I stopped resisting my wife, when I accepted totally that I wanted her. It was before I began therapy and medication because she was the impetus for that -- which occurred after we were married. I don't know that there was a moment as much as forgetting. A day elapsed and then another until I could not remember why I wasn't 100%.
With her predecessor, I had a better reason for resistance at first. That woman -- younger than you are here, though you will be in your middle-late twenties when you meet her -- gave you a few good excuses to keep your bags packed. She was young and, as a college student, was going to leave for the summer and maybe never return to you. Then she did return, but you were already in love with her. Her firmness in loving you -- even when she no longer could be your girlfriend -- is what let you figure out how to love.
So, returning to the point, you may be indulging some degree of revisionist history here, and so I feel entitled to call it into question and revise your revision.
It is very true that Kate in the end rarely treated me with the respect, attention, and adoration that Emily does as a point of her existence.
I am not sure who gets the demerits here. It is possible that neither Kate nor you deserve them. She could be harsh. You could be difficult. She would push you away. You would get possessive. However, you were kids. This had been her first serious relationship. In most ways, you could say the same.
Kate did love you as best she could. You did the same. It was imperfect, but it likely couldn't have been any more perfect.
This speaks entirely to the romantic relationship. You were both hurtful idiots in the months between her dumping you and you beginning your relationship with Emily -- and both of you will persist in this, though you demonstrably more. We can forgive this too by considering your age and inexperience, but it affected you, nonetheless.
All that said, why are you comparing the actions of an ex-girlfriend to that of your girlfriend? By the nature of the roles, those should never be the same.
Emily is what I need in my life right now.
I could interrogate every word of this statement separately, but let's not.
We can take as given Emily's virtues here. Not her flaws and faults later, though they existed here in ways you thought were charming (fixation on martial arts over anything else, mental health issues she at least was dealing with, deceit, assorted disorders). I maintain that you should have been best friends and maybe seen how things progressed naturally rather than rushing.
So, I can see how you need her and want her. It might have helped if she wanted you less, as it would have made you feel freer to figure out the tempo of the relationship you did want with her.
The "right now" sticks out to me, as it can be taken multiple ways. Is it "Emily is now the thing I need in perpetuity" or "at the moment, I need her, but maybe you won't later; She is a temporary need"? I do not know how you meant it, but I know your intentional linguistic ambiguity.
I can have intense love for others: Conor, Sarah, Kate, and so on.
Conor: Has not spoken to you in over a decade.
Sarah: Has not spoken to you in over a year (and for years before.)
Kate: Has not much spoken to you in indefinable time. (We would have to qualify what "speaking" means, though you lightly interact on the internet occasionally. I have not heard her voice outside a video in at least a decade, if not more.)
And every day, Emily makes herself all the more worthy to be included in that echelon. None rose there easily.
You loved Conor the moment you saw him being goofy in a silly school play.
You took Sarah as someone as Summer Scholars with you, and you only can say you honestly noticed her when she began to sing. Otherwise, you focused on the girls there whom you found attractive and a few of the boys (Asaph and a guy you nicknamed Bjorn) who cleaved to you. Sarah seemed too involved with the drama of which you wanted no part. As I covered above, you had a slow-burn friendship with her until you realized she had become physically attractive to you through no fault of her own.
You crushed on Kate the second you saw her in person, though you had emailed one another for at least a year before this. NyQuil may have helped lubricate your interest.
Love that can appear so quickly can disappear just as fast.
Something approximating real love doesn't go away.
Remember Eileen? I still think well of her and look fondly at pictures of her with her new baby because you were falling for her for a month and a half.
It lingers if there is even an iota of love beyond physical attraction. It is an "I am glad I got to live in a world that included you."
I do love Emily as my girlfriend and as my close friend.
I posit that you do not love her as your girlfriend. You are getting there with her as a friend, and I dearly wish you had pursued that first.