Two Steps Forward, One Step Back...

It's been a weird couple of weeks.

On the one hand, it's been incredible. Being back to work full-time at a company that wanted me to be there, working with people I got along with right off the bat and we work well together, in a part of the world I wasn't entirely sure I'd ever see again, let alone live in...?

After three years of either living in the back of a jeep or sleeping in some friends' basement, I'm able to sit down and write this out in the middle of my own apartment, with all my stuff around me and a comfortable bed waiting for me to fall into in a little while.

I'll wake up tomorrow and go to the gym, knowing I get paid Thursday, so I can take care of some more bills, and I feel like a more functional human being than I have in a really long time.

I genuinely couldn't have asked for a better situation to fall into my lap...and I guess that's the biggest problem I have at the moment.

Having been down this road before so many times, with the possibility that my life could finally be heading on a seemingly permanent upward trajectory, I'm waiting for someone or something to poke a hole in the surreal balloon I've been floating in since I got here and the inevitable plummet back to the harsh reality I've grown way too accustomed to.

And that it hasn't happened already is more than a little terrifying, if I'm honest.

To counterbalance that anxiety as best I can, I've been working every day to find something that I can feel some degree of happiness about. It doesn't have to be anything particularly revelatory or epiphanic, either. On Friday, for example, I found myself feeling kind of happy because a brand new set of Tupperware I'd ordered arrived.

Editorial Note: Seriously, if that's the sort of thing you're finding any measure of happiness or joy in, then you are very much refilling a tank where the gauge is reading waaaaaaay past E.

Still, for every one of those moments, I have others that are harder to navigate. Where my Depression and anxiety kick in and remind me of how fragile a position I'm still in. That at any second, it could all go away like SO many other times before now and that getting comfortable or anywhere near close to complacent would be both short-sighted and incredibly stupid.

Because of that, I've been operating at a more elevated pace than I have in a while, as well.

Being able to wait for things to come about organically is not something I'm much in the mood for right now. The motivation is there to go do everything and buy everything and make sure I have as solid a foundation under me as humanly possible, so I don't lie in bed at night freaking out about when the rug is going to get pulled out from underneath me.

Which is what happens when you've spent so long just trying to survive situations you couldn't have anticipated before they became unavoidable traps you couldn't get clear of in time. Then when you did get out it and found yourself in the friendly confines of being around people who care about you again, the idea of stepping back out into the world alone without that safety net is more than a little daunting.

Some mornings, I wake up and it feels like a year has gone by, instead of a month, and that most of that time went by so fast that I somehow squandered it.

Downshifting is hard, because sometimes it feels like backsliding. When you're wanting nothing more than to get your life in a forward-moving direction again, the absolute last thing you want is to have to slam the brakes and come to a screeching halt.

Or worse still, to have to throw it back in reverse.

But so far, I've managed to make it through the first month in one piece. I can't say the same entirely for my jeep, but at least I'm in a position where we both can get some of the attention we need to be as close to 100 percent as we can manage.

With luck, he'll be in the shop next month and I'll be in a doctor's office starting to get my own physical and emotional dings worked out. My Depression and anxiety are having a field day with that as well, trying to remind me that it didn't really help any before and it's probably not going to help now.

They've also been reminding me of just what it is I'm needing to have fixed — That I need to stop caring about people so much and letting them care about me to any degree of equal measure. 

Why? Because it hurts too much. Simple as that.

There is a part of me that wasn't there before the Breakdown, the Divorce and the Ghost, that is convinced that the only way I'm ever going to feel anywhere near the outskirts of better is to have a psychological professional teach me how best to permanently unhook that other part of me...or otherwise convince a medical professional how imperative it is that it be physically removed by whatever means necessary including, but not limited to, the use of a grapefruit spoon.

For now, though, I'm just trying to ride the waves and tread water as best I can. Tomorrow may be another pretty easy one like today was, or it may be an absolute shitshow. I have no idea. Wish I did, but IO suppose that would spoil the surprise, I guess.

New Frontiers

It's amazing how much can change in just a few weeks.

This time last month, I was still hunkered down in my little bunker at the bottom of my friends' house in Cleveland, working part time at a job I liked, but also knew was temporary and was barely paying me enough to keep my existence from becoming exponentially more difficult that it already was.

As has been my habit, I was still applying to jobs all over the place, hoping someone...anyone, would realize there is a guy out there with all these skills and all this experience who just wants to go back to work and make what I can only speculate equals a decent living at this point in time. And, as has been the norm for me going all the way back to 2014, the responses I got 99.99999% of the time remained constant.

That, of course, being the word No.

Then, not long after my birthday, I got an email from one of the more unlikely places I could've received any correspondence at all from.

Bangor, Maine - pop. 36,000

Someone I'd sent a resume to back in April apparently wanted to talk to me about going back to New England to work for them in putting together the news. A subsequent phone interview somehow led to a second interview and then I was told that I'd maybe hear back before Memorial Day on if I got the job or not.

Turned out I didn't have to wait that long. The job offer came that Thursday, and by the time everyone got back to work post-holiday, I was already scrambling to pack up my life into about a hundred boxes again and trying not to lose my mind as it sank in that I had a job again. Not only that, but I was going to have things like insurance and an apartment...and dishes...and my own bed!

It took a lot of late nights, and a whole lot of money I didn't have but which was given to me by some unbelievably generous and awesome people, but 900 miles across four states later...here I am, writing this in what is now the office of my apartment, having just gotten off a shift and in a little bit, I'm going to climb into my actual, proper bed and fall asleep in no-time flat.

When life turns on a dime like that, it's hard not to get a case of whiplash. The last three-four weeks have been a surreal blur from not knowing if things were ever going to get better again suddenly, BAM!!, they are better.

And let me be clear on something. For as depressing as things were in Ohio, they could've been so much worse if I'd had to try surviving there alone like I'd had to in Massachusetts through most of 2017. That I had a place where I could be safe and allowed to exist without any major strings attached, with people who genuinely cared about me and wanted me to just be okay...?

There's no metric I know of to quantify the level of gratitude I have for those two people, because they didn't have to do that. They could've been like a lot of other people I've known in my life who offered nothing but cheap sympathies, then threw up their hands and said there was nothing they could do. That eighteen months I spent there helped rehabilitate me on several levels and that was just as essential to my getting to this point as anything else.

So here I am, in the part of the world I wanted to be in when I set out from the Pacific Northwest three years ago. I have a job and it's a good one in my chosen career path, which is pretty rare these days. I have a roof over my head, places for my stuff and space to exist in.

I have health insurance I can actually use and I've already started to, which means I can hopefully get both my mind and my body finally put right. There's a lot of other things I get along with this job that I think a lot of people would take for granted pretty fast, and I have to keep reminding myself not to, because I know better than anyone what it's like to have next to nothing with seemingly no end to it in sight.

I also now have the freedom and flexibility to explore things externally and internally, and to keep figuring out the version of me I want going forward, which isn't easy to do when you're continuously forced into a prolonged stasis. It's equal parts frightening and exciting to think maybe I'm at a point where all these things that have been packed into all these boxes I've been dragging around since 2016 will never have to go back into them again.

But all this wouldn't be possible were it not for the fact that what I wanted to happen, what I've been trying to make happen with every fiber of my being for almost an entire decade has happened. Someone gave me a job I wanted in a part of the world I want to be in.

Sure, Maine isn't the flashiest place in the world. It's not Boston or L.A. or Miami. That's fine. I don't need to be there to be happy. I tried that already and we all know how that went anyway. What I've always wanted was a place where I could exist and be comfortable. 

Have I found it here? Honestly, it's too soon to tell after being here barely two weeks. But this I know.

It's definitely growing on me.

Just Another Day

The more I think about it, the harder it is to remember the last time I actually liked my birthday.

When I was a kid, I suppose I wasn't different than anyone else in the idea that the day I was born was a big enough deal that it warranted me getting cake and ice cream and presents from everyone I knew at the time.

In that respect, I know there were many of those early years where I had no reason in the world to be anything but excited beyond belief about turning a year older.

That all seemed to change by the time I was a teenager and living on the other side of the country.

I know a lot of the reason for that stems from the growth of my Depression. Living in a part of the world I didn't want to be in, surrounded by classmates who despised me and I despised in turn, and not having much in the way of support, affection, or anything from my family, there were many a birthday when I would lie in bed asking myself the same fundamental question...

What the hell am I still doing here?

By the time I hit adulthood, I was forced to come to terms with a reality that not many people I know have had to deal with, but all the empirical evidence was there to support its accuracy.

That reality, as unpleasant as it may sound, is that I am a mistake of two people who never should've gotten married and never should've had children. And when that realization kicks you in the head, ignoring it or denying it eventually becomes a pointless exercise.

In the now forty-two years of my existence, I've done all I can to live as meaningful a life as I know how. I've done a million things I regret, not nearly as many things that I'm actually proud of, and no matter what anyone says or tries to prove to the contrary, I've always tried to do the right thing, even when it was absolutely not in my best interest to do so.

All the hopes, ambitions and dreams I had in younger days have all been blasted into nothingness by the overwhelming cacophony of everyone who ever thought they had a say over my life all telling me the same thing: No.

All the people I grew to love more than I ever really should've are all gone now, mainly because I cared too much, I tried too hard and I wasn't who they wanted.

The days have become such that getting out of bed every morning is just as difficult as it is to get in and go to sleep. And for the past few weeks, the night's brought a new question to the forefront of my mind that's been harder and harder to ignore.

How many more birthdays do I really want to deal with?

An answer I was willing and able to accept came today while I was at the gym. Eight.

In eight years, I'll be fifty and by that birthday, if my life has not moved in a direction where I'm in a better place and able to feel anything resembling happiness or peace of mind, then I've decided there will not be a fifty-first.

That doesn't mean I'm deciding to lay down and play out the string like my dad did for the last ten years or so of his life. If anything, it means that time is ticking. I am officially on the clock to get things done. It means it's put up or shut up time for me and there are no more outs, excuses or grounds for procrastination.

Eight years to get things the way I want them or that's it. Last one out, hit the lights, because I'll be long gone.

Now, I know you're asking why I would do that. Why would I choose this option when there's so many other things I could possibly do instead?

I've tried most of them. They didn't work and the reason is two-fold. First is that for all my family's monumental dysfunction and its susceptibility to both addiction and mental illness, it also blessed me with a constitution that could result in me living potentially another thirty or forty years.

The idea of living that long and being forced to do so feeling this miserable and alone more days than not isn't a proposition I will accept. I'm sorry, and I would defy anyone to see if they could either, were they unfortunately put in my shoes.

Second, if that's what ends up being the outcome, then I would rather leave with some degree of self-dignity and the knowledge that I knew when to see myself out, instead of becoming an even bigger burden or a bigger example of 'what not to do' than I apparently am already.

So yeah...that's the plan. Forty-two birthdays down. Eight more to go.

A lot can happen between now and then and a lot of it will come down to whether or not I can finally find a way to make my life worth something.

Tally Ho.

Writer's Break

I find myself in a position I haven't been in for a while...wanting to write one of my stories again.
...And now we've reached the point in the plot where the protagonist struggles with the anxiety that comes with attempting such a challenging endeavor.

There was a time in my life where writing didn't scare me this much. To the contrary, the prospect of creating people and places, tapping into themes, ideas, machinations or speculations, used to excite the hell out of me.

Writing was one of the few arenas I ever ventured into where I felt I had some modicum of control over something. I know that observation can imply that I'm a control freak and, depending on your perspective or subjective biases of me, it's not an altogether unfounded one either.

When I was a kid, scratching down stories in old composition notebooks, it wasn't about control but creativity. Why it was that I became interested in storytelling, I couldn't really say. For whatever reason, it was something I just developed a knack for, according to my early grade school teachers.

The older I became and the more I struggled with trying to understand both the people I was in constant contact with, as well as the person I was growing into, the more I needed an outlet, some way to process all of these things pinballing around in my head.

And I won't lie. Some of it was fairly messed up and more than a little scary. That said, I always found it a little reassuring that I was never interested in following in the footsteps of Stephen King or Clive Barker and writing horror stories. My interest was more vested in the psychological, even though there are aspects of it that venture well into the realm of the horrific, trying to understand why we do the things we do to each other, good and bad, always fed my curiosity.

But now, what worries me more is the idea that in order to feel better, whatever the heck that means, it'll involve writing a story that taps into everything I've experienced and how I view the world in all its dark, dirty, unforgiving totality. To funnel it all out into chapters, paragraphs and prose.

It wouldn't be the first time I tried either. The last time I did was six years ago and while it had hints of what I think I'm capable of, part of me knows I can do better...if I can let myself fully go there.

The question is whether or not I can fully commit myself to that sort of a deep dive or not? It's one thing to have an interesting story in your head. It's another thing entirely when it refuses to be extracted.

Nightmares, Teddy Bears and Deja Vu

I woke up the other day from a nightmare so vivid that it's stuck in my mind and pulled on my heartstrings ever since...only it wasn't a nightmare in the classical definition of the term.

We tend to differentiate nightmares from other intense dreams by virtue of the sense of fear or terror they impart on our sleeping selves. This dream I had was on shared that same level of psychological or emotional intensity, but there was nothing frightening or terrifying about it.

When I left New England as a kid, my mother told me that she'd taken some of the things I'd left behind, namely my hand-built collection of model airplanes and all the old stuffed animals I hadn't been willing to part with yet. The one exception to that was a brown 'Gund' teddy bear I'd gotten when I was about ten and decided to bring with me out to the Northwest.

Editorial Note: I still hung on to him even into my mid-30's as something I could pass along to my child when they were born. I ended up giving him to my son when he was about two because his mother tried giving him back to me after our divorce. As far as I know, he still has it.

Anyway, the nightmare I had involved me going to my mother's house in Maine and reclaiming the rest of the gang. My mother was nowhere to be found, but I made my way inside and up to the attic. There, wrapped in a couple of old garbage bags, were friends I hadn't seen in more than a lifetime.

The most familiar one was also the biggest, a tan and brown dinosaur I'd named 'Stanley the Stegosaurus,' because that's what kind of dinosaur he was and I knew my dinosaurs well back then, and because by my childhood logic, Stanley seemed like as good a name as any for a Stegosaurus.

And sitting in that cramped, dusty, chilly space, getting reacquainted with Stanley and the rest, I found myself getting blasted by a rogue wave of emotion I could never have anticipated and absolutely could not escape. So much so that even thinking about it now, I'm not ashamed to say, is making me feel it all over again.

Why did it totally wreck me like that? Because they took me back to the point in my life where I was just a little ragamuffin kid who had no idea or even a comprehension that this is what my life was going to be like when I got to my parents' age. At that point, I was still happy and optimistic about life and the world and utterly blissful in my naive dissonance about just how incredibly screwed up it was going to start becoming before I could even blink.

I was still at a stage where my imagination could run rampant and not be shackled in a cage of mental illness and anxiety. Where I could have friends and not constantly worry about what I was going to do or not do that would cause me to lose them.

Where I could be boyishly smitten with a girl instead of having to be completely terrified as a man every time I let myself get anywhere near that with a woman.

At that point in my life, I still had my whole life to look forward to and if you'd told me then that this is where I'd be...that this is who I'd be...I know my younger self would've probably responded with something along the lines of this.

Then I don't want to grow up. Ever.

But grow up I did. Lessons did I learn. Regrets I have struggled with. People I have lost and pain I have felt.

And I know that's why the longer I sat there in the attic, cradling this old thing of fabric and stuffing and memory, I felt it all just start pouring out of me like a waterfall. I don't know how long I cried. I don't know if anyone heard me and if they did, I didn't care.

That little ragamuffin kid who'd been through so much hell just needed to let it out to someone who wouldn't judge him for doing so. The last thing I remember was wrapping my arms around Stanley and just bawling like I haven't in a long time...

...Then I woke up, and I did it all over again.

Just like I'm doing now as I try to get this all down on virtual paper.

I'm not a believer in gods or religions anymore. I used to believe karma was a thing until I realized the people I knew who did things to warrant getting a heaping helping of bad karma never got it, so they never had to live with what they'd done like I have.

But something I have believed in is deja vu, because I've experienced it more times than I can seriously count, and it's always based on something I've dreamed about at some point. I don't mean in ways like I can guess lottery numbers or presidential elections, but seemingly random moments or encounters that trigger a part of my brain that says with a high degree of certainty, we've done this before.

As sure as I am of anything, I know there's a point soon where I will be in that attic. Where I'll find that bag, open it up, see my old friends again and remember, for maybe the briefest of moments, how it felt to be free of all the things that were waiting for me when I had to leave them behind and had to grow up.

And I know that I will sit there and cry like I maybe have never cried before because there's nothing I can do to go back to that time, start all over, and hopefully get it right the second time around.

Detachment

As much as we despise cliches', there is legitimacy in the one that suggests two of the hardest teachers we learn from are age and experience.

If the last decade has taught me anything, it's that there truly is a sense of liberation in becoming as emotionally detached from the people in my life as much as possible.

When I was younger and more naive, the argument could be made that one of my most obvious flaws was I cared about people too much. I cared about both what they thought of me and I cared far more for them than I should.

Despite my ever-present, stubborn refusal to accept it, it would be unfair to put all this on my shoulders. As cliche' also dictates, we don't get to choose the family we're born into, nor do we always choose the people we end up falling for the hardest. And as much as I am deserving of blame for my part in making a mess of those relationships or potential relationships, it's been pointed out on many an occasion that the totality of said blame cannot solely be mine either.

When I set off on my own, following my divorce in 2011, whatever minuscule bits of romantic I'd managed to retain tried to reassure me it was a chance to meet new people, build new relationships and maybe find an avenue to what we're all hoping for when those opportunities present themselves...Happiness.

But, of course, that didn't happen. Instead, I ended up losing just as many friends as I'd made to that time, for various reasons. So I did the only thing that made sense. What people like my mother and some of the therapists I'd gone to to that point had strongly urged me to do.

I stopped caring about people any more, because as best I could tell, people had stopped caring about me.

In hindsight, I don't entirely blame them, either. When you see someone struggling like I was at the time and they're not able to either articulate that in a way you understand, or it affects their behavior in ways that make their presence in your life potentially toxic, the easiest thing to do is just write them off as another lost cause and focus on the people who seemingly have their shit together.

That was a problem for me, though, because those people weren't lost causes to me. They were friends and family that I cared about. People I'd spent years cultivating positive relationships with and not having that as a possibility anymore wasn't something I was willing to concede.

So I didn't. I tried to put out each fraying thread that connected me to them in the hope that I could salvage at least some part of my particular social tapestry. In retrospect, though, I'm realizing more and more that I should've done the smarter thing.

I should've just let the whole thing burn to the ground.

That is, after all, what we're all told to do. In this age of wholly expendable relationships, even with the people who we matter most to, it takes next to nothing to completely shut them out of our lives anymore. It's what the block function was designed for on every social media outlet we're reliant on for relationships and communication nowadays.

Maybe it's because I'm older and was conditioned in a much different time, but I never saw the benefit of being someone who just arbitrarily tossed friendships and relationships away when times got tough. Then again, I'm just as obstinate about the idea of actually talking to whoever it is you're trying to salvage said relationship with, rather than going through text messages or other passive-aggressive means.

By the time I reached thirty-five, I think it finally sank in that what the future held for me involved having next to no connections with people I know or used to know. I won't lie, it was a bitter pill to swallow, but it also came about in no small part because of what happened with Ghost, as well as my inability to get moving in the sort of upward trajectory that affords chances to have a bigger social life.

Being trapped in the stasis of forced mediocrity makes your attractiveness for both platonic and non-platonic relationships incredibly low. As a result, I struggle to keep in touch with even my closest friends from when I was a kid. 

Dating is another matter altogether. More than once, I had female friends whom I found myself becoming attracted to, only to have them do the same thing that Ghost did, albeit to lesser degrees. Thanks, but no thanks. I then got to watch them go into different relationships with guys who treated them just as badly as the guys who'd came before, and inevitably, I was called upon to be a voice of reason and a shoulder to cry on. 

And I did it. I played my part. But I was again reminded of just why it is that I'm not apparently cut out to be anything other than a disposable friend.

So now, as I approach another birthday in a few weeks, I think I've finally turned the corner on being able to keep people at arm's length once and for all, and my days of being as fully immersed in trying to stay connected to people are over.

It's not that I don't care about them anymore. Instead, I think my compassion has been tempered by all the times where I was slapped down and put in my place for caring as much as I did. There are days when the realization of where I'm at now emotionally does bother me. I know it shouldn't have to be this way, except I don't get a say in it anymore either.

It's an crazy new world. I just happen to be trapped in it.

Masochism Tango

"Why can't you just be happy?!"

This may be the second-most asked question I used to get along with why was I so angry all the time.

Logically, it seems purely rhetorical because if a person is always seeming to be one thing, then they can't very well be another simultaneously now, can they?

I started a new job last week and with that came the implied expectation that being able to make money and pay bills again would provide a measure of happiness. And while this may be true on a certain level, I think we often confuse safety and survivability with happiness.

Yes, being able to take care of myself is a nice thing, but that's a given. What isn't is that even though I like my job, it hasn't made me happier by any real measure, either.

In fact, I honestly cannot remember the last time I felt truly happy about my life from top to bottom.

On the one hand, I suppose it's natural for human beings to never want to reach that apex of complete satisfaction with their existence. After all, there are entire threads of both philosophical and psychological theory that state we never can and never should reach that level, because we should always keep driving towards various goals and never rest on our laurels.

And yet, if you're in the rarefied air of the financial and/or social elite, the rest of us poor paeans assume that's the absolute pinnacle of our modern existence, so it must be impossible to not be anything but happy.

I suppose if that were true, we wouldn't have a need for tabloid journalism, because there's few pastimes we love more as a culture than knocking an elite off the pedestal we sycophantically built for them to stand upon in the first place.

Then, on the flip side, are those of us for who being unhappy has become so ingrained in our DNA that we don't really know any other way to exist. It's not that we don't want to be happy. To the contrary, we spend a great deal of time and energy thinking, hoping, praying, pining for the means by which we can escape the maze of misery that we've locked ourselves into, only to realize that we sealed off the way out a long time ago.

For myself, I'm pretty sure that's been the background of my existence since before I was still in elementary school, and there's a name for this sort of psychological mindset:

Emotional Masochism.

Now, the implied connotation of that word aside, I'd like to think I'm not much different than anyone else in that I am not a big fan of being inflicted with pain. But the difference between physical and emotional masochism is that the former is obviously affiliated with sex, while the latter is both more subtle and also more destructive.

Emotional masochism isn't even so much a byproduct of Depression. For a lot of us, it can become the hinge point on which our attempts to break out of a Depressive cycle or resort to self-sabotage often hinges on.

In hindsight, this shouldn't be anything new to me. Like I said, I've lived like this for longer than I really recognize. Part of what I've been willfully ignorant of, though, is just how pervasive and deeply rooted my emotional masochism has become in the last ten years.

I was talking with my brother a few weeks ago and mentioned that I've been trying to convince myself it's beyond time to get off social media and go back to a non-connected lifestyle. After all, I don't get anything out of it and really haven't for a long time. To the contrary, whenever I do go on it, all it does is make me feel empty, unwanted and depressed because 1.) no one really reaches out to me anymore and 2.) I get a deep emotional longing to talk to people that I can't talk to anymore, because they've permanently disconnected from me.

This is a key tenant of Emotional Masochism. You know that something is only going to make you feel emotionally wounded, and yet you do it because on some level, you can only function by being in that position of emotional pain.

The same goes for:

• Trying to hang on to toxic relationships.
• Seeking approval from people who will never give it.
• Having difficulty existing in a conflict-free environment.
• Disregarding compliments or positive affirmations.
• Chronically pushing people away.
• Being unable to let go of past trauma.
• Needing to fix things with other toxic people.
• Taking responsibility for everything, even if you're not at fault.
• Beating yourself up through external stimuli that invokes sadness or pain.
• Feeling bad and apologizing for trying to be your genuine self.

Now, I may be crazy...but does that sound like anyone you know...?

I'm the first to admit that I truly despise either generating or being in orbit of drama. I've had more than my share for one lifetime and in coming to the realization of my propensity for passive-aggressive behavior a few years ago, I've tried making a concerted effort to both recognize and limit my output of both as much as possible.

But this is different.

It's not because I somehow like being miserable. Hell, nobody likes being miserable.

The problem is this is how I've learned to function for so long that if I find myself potentially deviating away from it and in a direction of possible, genuine happiness, my mind sees that and overcompensates by reminding me of all the reasons why I can never be happy.

And believe me...that list is incredibly long and makes a rather valid case when it wants to.

So when I find myself in those brief moments where I start thinking I've found the way out of my particular labyrinth of self-imposed misery, where I think to myself if I can just summon the means to get one of my books done, or focused on my video essays, or opening myself up to someone I might have an emotional connection with, I'm flooded with all the times I tried to do something similar and it blew up in my face.

Then there inevitably comes the sense that...oh yeah...this is how I'm supposed to exist. I'm the one who's not supposed to be happy because like all things, there's a finite amount of happiness to go around in the universe and if I manage to get my hands on some, then it means someone else has to be miserable instead.

Either that or the few people I have left in my life won't have reason to stay connected to me, because I somehow serve as an emotional counterweight for their own happiness and/or successes.

"Remember, if you're not careful, you'll end up like Devin and we ALL know what he's like. Whatever you do, DON'T end up like him!"

The weirdest thing, though, is as much as I feel the hurt I subconsciously inflict upon myself sometimes, other times I just end up feeling...numb. Like I've gotten so used to the emotional self-flagellation at this point that the sting isn't as sharp as it used to be. The result is I don't downshift into feeling miserable or anything, but more that it establishes a baseline for how I'm going to feel for most of the day.

By now, I'm pretty sure I know every nook and cranny of the labyrinth I've constructed for myself, because I've been round it more times than I can count. If anything, I'm at my most stable when I'm sitting dead in the center of it because, as physical/sexual masochists will likely agree with, you feel the most alive when you're in the most pain.

After this long, I don't know if I'll ever truly stop being emotionally masochistic. I'm so comfortable in beating myself down and self-sabotaging every possible avenue that could lead to some form of contentment or happiness that to suddenly stop doing so feels incredibly alien and scary to me.

I've always told people that I'm my own harshest judge and my own worst critic and for good reason. There's things I've done which warrant such scrutiny and some form of punishment. And I've had people try so many times to convince me over the years that I need to forgive myself for both those things and what other people did to me that I still shoulder the blame and responsibility for.

I know they're right. I know that I should. I know there's nothing I can do about all those things and continuing to hurt myself over them on an emotional level is just as damaging as if I were doing it on a physical one.

But honestly...the reason why I don't, as bizarre as this is going to sound...is because I've been hurting myself for so long that I feel the closest thing to happiness I can reach only when I'm feeling miserable.