So Fantastico

I’m thinking I might stop going to therapy. I just don’t really see a point in it anymore. I haven’t felt particularly manic, nor am I significantly depressed.  I don’t seem to be getting worked up over situations at work, and I haven’t felt angry to the point of rage. I’m not napping during the day, I’ve been sleeping regular hours, I don’t feel incredibly tired all the time. But I also don’t feel like I have way too much hyper energy. I haven’t been having gastrointestinal issues, and I really haven’t even been finding it hard to concentrate and get my work done. I feel evened out. Any mood swings that I do have I recognize as being predominantly hormonal and almost certainly related to PMS. 

I just don’t feel like talking about anything anymore in therapy. There is really nothing left to say. Everything is still the same. I feel like this past year in therapy has really helped me understand a lot of things about myself, but I really don’t feel like talking about those things anymore, week after week after week. I’m sick of talking about it and honestly, I don’t even want to think about it. 

At the moment, writing things here has been helping me more than therapy. 

The hardest part is when I’m alone. I go to work and all day have my mind occupied with tasks and meetings and friends. I feel, I would say, almost great. But it’s at the end of the day when everyone is starting to go home and the office gets really quiet that I start to think about things. The drive home is even worse - a full hour of me, alone, just thinking. And when I come upstairs to go to bed at night and I’m alone in my room…well, that’s the worst of all. 

Because I just can’t get it out of my head yet. When everything gets quiet and I’m alone, then I’m stuck with my own thoughts, where I can replay everything over and over in my head, and question everything and have a million different feelings at once. 

But what’s the point in paying $20 a week to tell somebody that? There aren’t any suggestions that will help me. I’m not going to get a mediation app or sing in the shower or write all of my feelings down as a stage play (all things she suggested I do). None of those things will help me. There is nothing that will help except apparently time. And I’d prefer to spend that time avoiding talking about it if at all possible. 

I’d say I feel kind of numb except I don’t. I feel normal, or as close to normal as I can get. But I also find myself just not giving a shit about a lot of stuff. Which kind of sounds like depression but I think I really just need to focus on myself. I just don’t think I can get super invested in anything right now, and I don’t feel bad about that at all. I feel a little selfish but I also kind of don’t care. I need to help myself right now, and I don’t have the time or the energy to do anything except that.

My friend said to me today that she was really proud and impressed with how well I’ve been handling what she rightly declared was a “mind fuck” situation. I said that I was surprised too that I wasn’t more of a wreck and have been doing well. I told her that I’m still sad and I’m still angry and I’m still so confused.

She said, “I’ve never been the kind of person that says, ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Because sometimes the things that happen to us do feel like they’re killing us. But I think when you move on, you’ll just appreciate what you’ll have that much more.”

I’ve never appreciated my friends more than I have this year. How they never stopped being there for me.

And she’s right - some things do feel like they’re killing us. I abhor the thought that it gets better, or it was a learning opportunity, or you’ll come out stronger, or anything else that everyone always says when anyone feels heartache. I’m not ready for it to be a fucking learning experience that makes me a fucking better person. I’m too sad to think anything is for the best. I hate that I know my friends are relieved and that my mother especially is relieved, because she was against the situation from day 1. I hate the thought that I will move on and be okay because right now I’m not ok. Someone hurt me, badly. And they will never be sorry, they will never apologize, they will never talk to me again. They never loved me or needed me even though they said they did. And those things will ALWAYS have happened. For the rest of my life, the ending will be concrete and canon and can never be changed. It just always gets to be the way it is, the way it was. The reality of how they hurt me will never change and the stagnancy of that is just ALLOWED to happen. He gets away with hurting me, because he hasn’t tried to fix it, he hasn’t tried to talk to me, probably hasn’t thought about me, so the last thing I’ll ever know about him was how he hurt me and didn’t care.

Yet, it’s up to me to make myself a better person?

What I’m trying (and I think failing) to say is that it’s not fair. It’s not fair that I can’t change the situation. It’s not fair that I have no say about it. It’s not fair that I’m sad and I cry at night. And I hate that the way that I’m feeling, like I’m being killed, is ultimately supposed to be the best thing for me.

Because that’s the most unfair thing of all.

After listening to my coworker talk about her boyfriend and me keeping my mouth shut that he sounds like an asshole, I met my very good friend for dinner to talk about how the guy she was involved with abruptly quit the job where they work together and is moving to DC. 

She and I have been leading parallel lives lately. She is also bipolar. She also got involved with an addict. She also has gastrointestinal problems (though hers are far worse than mine). There were times in these past few months where I realized we were probably enabling each other by validating each other’s emotions, since both of us were so sick and neither of us wanted to change. Both of us were holding on so fucking tight to what we thought we were doing for love. 

And as we sat there at dinner tonight, that parallel deepened, and I saw myself within her. Her eyes swollen from crying. Her abruptly getting up and running to the bathroom to be sick. Heartbreak. Anger. Self-loathing. My heart broke into little bits; pieces of me and her and him and him. 

She said how sometimes it gets so bad she wants to die, and other times she’s so anxious that she can’t eat or sleep. I told her that it sounds like bipolar, and that that is where I was several months ago, when I had my breakdown.

Then I said, “Do you still feel like you want to die?” She said, “No.” And I said, “But you’d tell me if you did?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “I don’t mean right now in this moment, I mean if in a few days from now or a few hours…you’d tell me right? Because I’ll drop whatever I’m doing immediately.” And I watched as tears poured out of her eyes and my heart felt like it was going to stop beating I felt so profoundly sad for her. 

And again I ask myself how we let it come to this. How we gave ourselves so totally and completely to someone we thought cared about us and then were left to pick up the pieces in the anguish they left behind. Did we think we deserved this? Did we think we were in love? Why did we let them treat us this way? 

I’m worried about her. I’ll be checking up on her tonight and for the next few days. (Side note: Fucking news flash, that’s what friends do when they care about other friends.) I’ve been where she is. And while nothing can take away the anguish of a broken heart (except apparently time, but I have yet to see that be demonstrated), when I was in that dark place, the only thing I needed was to know that at least one person cared. 

And at the end of every day, I find myself hating the fact that I wish he cared about me. What I imagine is that he never, ever thinks about me. At all. That he feels this burden lifted off his shoulders and his whole body is just flooded with relief that I’ll never bother him again. And the one question constantly in my mind: Why? Why any of it? 

My mother and I were going out to Homegoods on Saturday and I climbed into her Mustang and waited for her to come outside. As I sat in the car, I just started crying. My mom got in the car in shock and said, “What? What’s wrong? What happened?” And I said, “Everything reminds me of him.” How did I get myself into this? What did I do to deserve this? Because I cared about somebody? Because I took a chance on something? How much longer will I hurt like this? And it only ever get’s worse because every day that goes by is one more day that proves he doesn’t care. 

And every night when I lay down to go to sleep, I have that same question running through my head: Why? And I almost always fall asleep sad thinking, “He never cared.” 

You have no idea how difficult it is to restrain yourself from yelling to your friend that the guy she is involved with is a dick and an asshole and she should leave him immediately. I don’t know how my friends did it for so long.

I have a few friends going through this now and it’s such a delicate dance to be sympathetic while gently trying to hint that he’s actually a terrible person who treats you like shit. It’s sad to watch people I care about defend a guy who is treating them poorly. And as I talked to my friend today I realized that just a few months ago (fuck, just a few weeks ago) the roles were reversed and it was my friends who were doing the restraining and the sad looks. My friends delicately saying, “I don’t like the way he’s treating you.” How do we get ourselves into these situations? How do I find myself listening to my friends cry over a boy, over and over?

Is it that we don’t love ourselves enough? Is it that we think we don’t deserve better? Is it because we’re so desperate for those fleeting moments of euphoria that we hang on for so long hoping we can get that back again?

I think that must be how it is for me. That’s how I see if for myself. My friends are smart, talented, beautiful, and they always, always deserve better than to be treated in any way that is mean or degrading or hurts them. So why, if I can see that in my friends, and I can see how amazing they are and know without a doubt the wonderful things they deserve…..then why, why, why can’t I see it in myself?

I close my eyes at night and see flashes of memories from this year. Moments seared into my mind. Always reminding me of the same feeling.

When I slipped and fell down the stairs. Pulling bloody gauze out of my mouth after I had my wisdom tooth pulled. Looking through a car window at a set of keys dropped by the seat. Walking through a door leaving an IMAX theatre. Cows on a hill. My office at work, empty. Watching my hands shake as I typed, “I love you, too.” My mom sitting on my bed at 1 in the morning as I cried, and cried, and cried. Ordering a sandwich at Wawa in my pajamas. Laying a cold washcloth over my eyes. Uneaten sushi. A blue shirt. Laying pills on the counter. Eating a hot dog in bed. Watching myself in the mirror as I cried.

These moments are uneventful, but they cycle through my mind again and again because beneath all of them lies the way I’ve felt through this year. They’re all connected in some way to a memory, an event, a feeling, an emotion. And when I think about them, I have this sad sort of longing to return to all of those moments and live them again. Have that feeling again. Because all I feel now is sadness as I am constantly reminded that those moments are gone. Those feelings in those moments are never coming back.