And on and on it goes

I’m feeling awful today, the worst I’ve felt in a long while. I know I’ve been trying to make these whiny vent posts less in recent months, but I don’t really have anyone to talk to about my feelings and I’m having a really hard time right now. In the past when I’ve been struggling, I’ve written about it on here and it has helped me a lot. That’s how I started this blog after all, and the reality really does seem to be that as long as I’m writing this blog I’ll be including posts like this. The specific situation that I’m in is in fact very similar to all the others, I’m going to sound like a broken record but I just don’t know what else to do. I’m just not sure what I can do, in fact the current feeling is only a microcosmic taste of an inevitable future situation that will probably be close to unbearable. I’m just going to say it, however pathetic it might make me seem, because to do otherwise would be dishonest. Emotionally dishonest, to myself and to those of you who regularly read my stuff/ have been here for a long time.

I mentioned very early on after I started this blog that some new people had begun working at the same place as me, to replace my oneitis who had left and whose felt absence (along with some other coinciding circumstances) inspired that initial spate of posts that kicked this whole project I’m engaged in right now off. I also mentioned that despite my recent experiences of being burned by unrequited romantic interest, I very quickly began to start picturing one of these new people as someone who I could develop similar feelings for. Of course she had a boyfriend, they always do, and this in a way prevented such feelings from developing which at the time I saw as a positive thing. I didn’t really want to relive the experience I’d just gone through again when the inevitable ending to the period where our lives cross comes to it’s end.

In the following months after starting this blog I spent a lot of time reflecting (an activity which I have always overindulged in), and I talked about how there was no real basis for these feelings I described as oneitis back then. I wrote about how in my specific case Ireally knew nothing about this girl, and also I talked about the phenomenon of oneitis in a more general sense. I was really overly critical perhaps, because on reflection I was a little disappointed by how I had been lowered by these feelings. I had to explain why they weren’t real, why they were stupid and revealed my weakness in order to perhaps prevent myself from going through that again. The problem is, and this is something I’ve grown to realise over the last year actually, you can’t intellectually explain away a feeling.

For entirely different purposes I recently made an analogy regarding bears, I think in the last post I uploaded. The idea being that you can tell someone a hundred times that the best way to scare a grizzly bear is to confront it and hold your arms out to appear as large as possible, but most people will just revert to instinct and run even if they know that information about holding their arms out. It’s possible of course that the fact about bears I’m mentioning is wrong, it’s just trivia that you often hear repeated and may be untrue, but the point still stands regardless. Well that’s sort of the situation I’m in now. I’ve tried to be as rational as possible, and I’ve managed to hold these feelings off for a good year but in recent weeks I’ve just been unable to do it anymore.

It’s the same girl I’m talking about, the one who started when I began writing here. She still has a boyfriend, in fact last night (though I doubt I’ll finish this entire post this evening) I saw him in person for the first time, so he’s no longer just a hypothetical figure but an undeniably real individual. There’s really no happy ending here, at least with the last girl I could fantasise about us ending up together but I can’t even picture that in this case. I don’t see it happening, and there are several other reasons why nothing ever would as well other than the fact that I don’t think I have the charm/ ability to “steal someone’s girl” or the poor morals required to attempt it. She’s 27 years old (which surprised me to find out, I assumed she was at most a year or two older than me, a 22 year old), and she doesn’t just have a boyfriend but has been with him for what seems like almost a decade at least according to her facebook page.

He has a car, he drives her to work sometimes, and they go on trips outside of the city like a real adult couple. They moved to this country together, from eastern europe, and so are probably reliant on one another to afford to keep living here. They seem to be close with one another’s family members, again from snooping around on her facebook page I saw lots of comments from the bfs mother. They’re old enough that it wouldn’t be unusual to get married, to have children. It’s like a completely different world she inhabits, and yet I feel so comfortable around her and happy. It’s not like that other girl in fact, because I do speak to this one a lot. I have no trouble making her laugh, and there’s something to the way she really seems to pay attention to everything I say that just makes me feel like I actually exist and it’s so rare for me that I’m now falling into a depression just because I won’t see her for a month.

It’s really hard to explain it, but somehow despite English being her second language and me being rather soft spoken and talking awkwardly she always understands what I’m saying. It’s something that many of the people I interact with who were born here and only speak English don’t even manage, and it has certainly contributed to the feelings of alienation and detachment I’ve had both growing up and as an adult. Often people don’t hear me, or don’t seem to quite understand what I’m saying, and they’ll just awkwardly try and change subject or they’ll respond to something they think I said in a very generic way that could cover multiple things. She hasn’t ever done that, as far as I can remember.

Once in fact, I said something and she didn’t hear me properly but I assumed she didn’t hear me at all because she was counting up the money in the till (the vast majority of our interactions take place when one of us is starting and the other finishing), and so feeling ever so slightly dejected I decided to just pretend I didn’t say anything. This is something that happens a lot, as well as being misunderstood often people just don’t hear me and while I know it’s not the case it really feels sometimes like I’m just being ignored. However after a few moments she turned around to face me, and with a very warm look asked me to say that again because she hadn’t heard properly. It’s probably really creepy that I remember that so well, if I ever mentioned it to her I bet she’d be creeped out and probably wouldn’t even remember the moment, but I can’t help but keep replaying it and some others in my head.

She’s working right now as I write this, even though we were both out together for a Christmas celebration until 3am last night (or this morning I suppose), and I’m just trying so hard to resist the urge to go and see her. I can’t do that though, it would reveal everything and she’d be freaked out and I’d probably lose my job or she’d quit or I don’t even know what. There’s a football match on, and so she’s there with one of the other guys I work with. Usually the shop just has one person, but on football game days and sometimes on mid-week afternoons there are two of us who have to work together. She really seems to have a kind of problem with him, he’s new and I remember as soon as he started she would ask me if I thought he was strange or weird. Then a little after that I remember my manager came to tell him off for something while I was switching over with him, and while I wasn’t allowed to listen I heard her tell him that he said something that was inappropriate.

Last night she was complaining about how she would have to be working alongside him today, and my manager made a joke about how she “sorted things out now”. One of the last things I spoke about with the girl from Italy who I’ve mentioned a few times was this situation funnily enough, and she said it seems like he probably asked her out. So it’s not like my fear is unwarranted, and I don’t want to ruin things because honestly as absolutely pathetic as it sounds those fifteen minutes or so where we switch over a couple times a week are the thing I look forward to in life more than anything else right now. I don’t understand why I can’t be there right now instead, I’ve never done the football shift before because they all think I’m incompetent (admittedly I don’t do much to change their minds, generally I do prefer being kept to the easier/ less busy shifts) but I easily could. My manager asked yesterday if I would like to start actually, so perhaps I will.

I don’t know if I’ll be doing it with this girl though, we’ve been doing the two person shifts mid-week for a good few months now and I’ve still not been placed with her. I’ve done it with almost everyone else, and yet not the one who I clearly am the most comfortable around and get along with best, and who I’ve had the least opportunity to get to know better. In fact I used to see her more often, when she first started I would see her usually two or three times a week and nowadays it’s often just once a week or even not at all. Last week and this week we were not going to see one another, and I got a little upset when I found out honestly, but then that evening after finding out she was there and told me about the Christmas get together that was planned that took place last night.

I also did end up seeing her another day, because someone was ill and I had to work extra. Which is why I took quite a while to update that Pre-Socratics post I’ve been slowly adding to. I started to wonder if she was asking to be placed at a different time than me, because maybe I made her uncomfortable. Then again, she openly complained about the new guy and still was made to work with him. Perhaps my manager is just keeping us apart because she can tell I have developed some kind of unhealthy attachment. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I know that it feels like I’m being kept apart from her. Which she doesn’t seem to want, I mean as I said she’s always really friendly and warm with me, she’s emotive and very responsive and she laughs all the time when we talk.

I’m not saying this is because my feelings are reciprocated, I doubt they are. She just seems to be this way generally, that’s the kind of person she is, I wonder if she knows how much just being around someone like that can make someone’s day. I think it’s more likely if anything that she sees me as a younger brother figure. Not to imply there’s anywhere near the level of intimacy between us as there is between siblings, but in the sense that she sees me as a shy/ awkward boy but for whatever reason a likeable one and she just wants to be nice. Yesterday after we had been drinking at the pub for a while, four of us went to a nightclub which is not an environment I am familiar with at all and while the three of the people I was with danced I mostly sat down sipping my drink.

Eventually though I did have enough alcohol that I somehow found the confidence to stand up and shuffle around from left to right in the same general vicinity as them, but I was still very self conscious even after that (and I had quite a lot to drink, although not that much because I didn’t have any memory loss). So she grabbed my hands and stood right in front of me face to face and I danced with her like that for a while, if you can really call what I was doing dancing. She shared my glass of water too, it might seem weird to focus on that but it says something. I mean if she really thought I was weird or disgusting or whatever it is that I’m afraid of, she would never even consider that. She used a straw, but I think that was more because she was worried I’d have an issue with her drinking straight from my glass.

I wish I could just enjoy having someone so lovely in my life like her, though only really for a short interaction a few times a weeks at best, without developing feelings but it seems that I just can’t. I thought I finally had become better than this, the last post I wrote on the topic of oneitis was meant to represent that kind of mental development, but clearly I was wrong. The bear has arrived, and my instinct is to run. I thought that I would just be happy to see her from time to time, but then more recently as we’ve been seeing one another less and less I’ve found myself becoming rather upset. There were a few weeks where I only saw her once, and the rest of the week just felt like one long wait until the next 15 minute chat I’d have with her the week following. It is completely demoralising, I feel like such a loser but I don’t really know what else I can do.

I’m not going to see her this week, unless there’s another emergency and I have to work extra again, and then she’s going away to visit her family for Christmas and spend the New Year with her boyfriend somewhere. I honestly feel a little like a drug addict who is being forced to go cold turkey, it doesn’t help that I’m probably suffering from depleted serotonin levels thanks to the alcohol last night. I also got very little sleep, I couldn’t fall asleep for a good hour or longer and then I kept dreaming about alternate ways the evening could have ended. Most importantly I dreamt that I gave her a hug before saying goodbye, I wanted to and she seemed to want to as well but in the end I just shook her hand to say goodbye. All the other girls there hugged me, and they all hugged one another, they always do, but again because I’m so awkward and nervous I never initiate and so it’s more like I’m just letting them hug me rather than really doing anything myself.

So I dreamt that I did give her a hug, and that I thanked her for being so encouraging and sweet, and because I kept waking up and falling back to sleep I kind of lost track of what was reality and what was the dream. Then I had another dream where I texted her that I would cover her shift if she was too ill to work today (she had seemed almost about to throw up just before we said goodbye), and then I woke up and considered actually making that offer. Then I fell asleep again, and dreamt that I just went in to work and just hung out there all afternoon chatting. It’s a weird phenomenon, having multiple dreams that seem to follow directly on from an evening you just had. I’ve only experienced it once before, and yes it was also after a night out with my co-workers and because I was sad about someone leaving. Although a while before I started this blog, so I don’t think I ever wrote about it.

It seemed like I was in this weird half asleep half awake state for ages, but in reality I got home at around half past three and woke up earlier than I usually do at about ten. In fact the last dream I had scared me because I dreamed that I had slept until 5 in the afternoon and that my sleep schedule would be completely fucked up leading back to more insomnia like I had during the summer, but then I woke up and saw it was ten and decided to get up then and there. So I’m very tired today, I’ve had maybe five hours of sleep. I would have gone for a walk around the park to clear my head but instead I’ve just done nothing at all for hours but lurk on r9k and try to distract myself from this crushing emptiness that has been building inside of me since the dreams started. And now I’m writing, but I really don’t feel much better this time.

I don’t think there’s any way this doesn’t end up with me feeling infinitely worse than I do right now, and I’m really struggling to hold it together as it is, when the inevitable ending comes and I lose her completely. Not that I have her, but you know what I mean. In the title to my post a few months back about the girl from Italy, I referenced the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, but really it seems that this situation I’m in right now might deserve that title far more. I haven’t actually read the book, but I’ve read a fair amount about it and right now this one quote from Goethe about how many young men will have a time in their life where they feel the book was written especially for them is inclining me towards perhaps finding a copy myself to help cope with these current feelings.

Another thing I talked about a few months ago was online dating, and how I was perhaps reconsidering my position on it, but right now the idea turns my stomach. I can’t bear to even imagine myself with anyone else. Although I’m not sure I can really imagine myself with this girl either, I can’t actually picture it in my mind. Even though I get along with her really well, and she might be one of the only women I’ve ever met who I can relax and dare I say bee myself around, I can’t actually create the mental image in my head of us in a romantic relationship. Maybe it’s because of the boyfriend? I never had this trouble with my other oneitises, even though I would say they were neither as pretty nor as easy to talk to and be comfortable around.

I’ve had a photo of her opened on one tab on my laptop all day, and every once in a while I’ve been going back to stare at it for a few moments. I don’t know why I’m like this, I feel like I’m slowly falling deeper and deeper into despair and I don’t know how I can escape it. I’m not even sure I can, maybe this is just my personality type. I’ve always become unhealthily attached to people, I would weep for hours as a little boy when my dad would have to go home. I saw him only on weekends for many years, before he started living with me again in my teens. I had a friend growing up who lived on a farm in the countryside and we only saw one another a couple times a year, and I would cry every time we had to say goodbye to him as well. Nowadays of course I cry very rarely, I can’t actually recall the last time I cried, but I’ve been pretty close today I have to admit.

I’m so weak, it’s just the worst. I’ve written nearly three and a half thousand words and I hardly feel any better at all. I’ve experienced feelings of despair, and emptiness and so on to some degree for over a decade now but I’ve never really had suicidal thoughts. I’m honestly staring to actually get them now for the first time, because it’s really sinking in that I might just have to live like this for the rest of my life. Since my very early teens I’ve been living with this feeling that I’m waiting for something, this kind of eternal anticipation for something that I can’t quite describe that’s always just a few months away. It’s been so long, and I just cannot do it any more.

I can’t go on anymore, I really can’t live like this for much longer. I’m not saying I’m making plans to kill myself any time soon, some of you might miss me, but I’m not willing to live like this past my 30s. I’m not even sure I can go that long, if I’m 27 (the same age as new oneitis is about to be, and let’s just be honest here that’s what she is now) and I’m still alone and gradually developing more and more intense and one sided relationships with girls I barely know I’m going to have to seriously consider getting off this ride. It’s just not worth the effort, I’m not willing to just suffer in quiet desperation until I’m too old and bitter to opt out on my own terms. Just thinking about being 27 reminds me that at that age it’s highly likely I’ll no longer be in contact with new oneitis anymore, fuck, it actually physically hurts to think about that.

I think if she ever does leave I won’t be able to stop myself from telling her how I feel, if I still feel as intensely about her as I realised I do today. The evening last night, and the depleted serotonin, and the lack of sleep, are almost certainly affecting me quite a bit, however it’s not like the feelings aren’t real. I do feel this way, and a lot of what I’ve spoken about has been building up for a long time. I just feel so fucking alone, even if miraculously she did feel even slightly similarly she still has a boyfriend who she knows loves her to distract her. Though of course having feelings for someone when you’re in a relationship is it’s own weird and complex feel to deal with. I don’t think she does feel similarly though.

I mean it’s possible she’s attracted to me in a very superficial way, although I believe that women generally do not find themselves attracted to guys who are younger than themselves. Five years younger particularly is a big enough gap to be unusual, but not old enough for there to be a fetishism like some much older (as in middle aged) women have for younger men. Still, I often will catch her watching me or staring at me when I turn around to look at her and she’ll smile or laugh. Almost every time I started talking to someone else last night I would notice she was watching me, focusing, and never the other person. And there’s often a slight delay where we’ll hold eye contact a little longer than is normal I think, though I’ve always had trouble making eye contact with people so I’m not sure exactly what normal is. Maybe there’s really nothing there, and I’m just imagining things. I certainly want there to be something there, I know that makes me a bad person but it’s the truth.

I’m also completely timid and weak, outside of my actual appearance there is nothing about me which is appealing to women. Yet she’s just so nice, when talking with her it can’t help but feel like there’s something even though once out of that bubble and looking back in hindsight I realise that’s just how she is with people.. I think. I feel real, like that line in Joker where he tells his therapist that he often doesn’t even feel like he even exists, I get that as well often. Yet when I’m around her I feel completely real, her very presence is life affirming for me in a way. I actually quite vividly recall an exchange with her where I first felt this, it was just a normal smalltalk style conversation like we usually have but something about the way she responded to what I said and truly engaged with me rather than simply “going through the motions” like people tend to do just led to this moment of clarity. Stood there kind of taken aback for a very brief second, realising that I really do exist and share this world with many other people.

I’m not sure if I have anything else to say, I just want to keep on writing until I feel better but nothing is working and I’m just repeating myself. This writing as a cope thing might not be working anymore, maybe the excessive self examination has exhausted all excuses I have and now I’m faced only with the harsh and bitter reality that I really am doomed to repeat this same horrible experience over and over until I find the courage to put a stop to it. I’ve been reading a lot about the writer Fernando Pessoa (from Portugal) recently, there have been quite a few threads about him on /lit/ in recent weeks. I’d like to share a few quotes from those threads and other places online that I’ve been reading about him.

“Pessoa held a lifelong job as bookkeeper and translator of foreign correspondence in Lisbon, a city he rarely left, and lived an extremely solitary life, never marrying. Josipovici describes him as a man who dressed “with the utmost correctness; a man of few gestures in a peninsula of gesticulators; smoking up to eighty cigarettes a day”

“Despite his apparently ascetic and asexual nature, Pessoa was recalled by friends and neighbours as a deeply lonely man, his outlook on intimacy oscillating wildly between complete rejection of love in favour of intellectual pursuits, to obsessive – and rather worrying – devotion to women who are unlikely to have been aware of his feelings towards them. One theory claims that some of Pessoa’s earliest heteronyms were invented to allow him to write lengthy erotic letters – discovered several decades after his death – to various young women living in Lisbon, without the risk of these letters being associated with him.”

“As far as is known, he died a virgin; he did take up with one Ophelia Queiroz when he was 31 and she 19 — she also wrote to some of the heteronyms. After six months Pessoa broke it off, saying that he was not like other humans, followed a different Law.”

“Although his relationship with Ofélia [Queiroz] was a brief and largely one-sided one, her affect on the aspiring poet was remarkable. Ofélia’s younger sister Leonor was tasked with keeping a watchful eye on the narrow Lisbon street on which the girls lived with their parents. Should Fernando appear, pretending to be passing that way on a work errand (unlikely given that he worked only part-time) the younger girl was to rush inside and warn Ofélia that “her admirer” was approaching. Fernando was known to do his utmost to arrange a meeting between himself and the object of his affection, sometimes feigning a sudden cramp or twisted ankle outside her home on the Rue Adelas, and, as his literary endeavors became more expansive, turning up unannounced in the guide of one of his many fictional personae. Needless to say, Mr. Queiroz was himself not pleased at all by “the childlike leper” who returned repeatedly to inquire about his eldest daughter. Once, in a fit of rage, the old man was said to have poured the contents of a bedpan from an upstairs window, drenching Pessoa who reacted with customary oversensitivity, collapsing to the ground and pretending to suffer a full-body seizure.”

“Deeply troubled with the idea that his youth had now officially passed, Fernando spent his thirty-first birthday walking the streets of Lisbon alone long into the evening. Overlooking the waters of the Tagus, unusually disturbed for the time of year due to the powerful storm approaching Lisbon from the South-West, Pessoa could just make out the Belém Tower, a medieval fortress constructed on a tiny island which was at that moment being bombarded by the surging waves. The tower appeared to be the sole stationary object in the landscape ahead, bearing the thrashing waves with a kind of poignant dignity; separated from the rest of Lisbon and its miles of warm and well-lit homes which stood in stark contrast to this lonesome tower which held his gaze. At that moment, he claimed, the tension which had defined his life since his teenage years suddenly lifted – and though the melancholy which accompanied it did not itself dissipate, the aspiring poet gained in that image of the besieged tower a representation of his own life and the future he would succumb to. Haunted by loneliness, scarred by regret, condemned by a sense of despair he would never quite overcome, Pessoa nevertheless returned to that image of the solitary tower whenever his sense of isolation and futility grew especially acute. In one of his final letters he writes that although he had not succeeded in attaining marriage, children or any degree of social success, he nevertheless counted among his few victories the fulfilment of his duty to “remain loyal to the little Fernando I once was, that child who spent so many days sitting silently at the window content with watching the rain which fell, so it seemed, across the entire world.”

Is this the kind of man I will one day become, so haunted by my experiences of loneliness and longing that I become incapable of love or having a healthy relationship. At least Pessoa was a highly intelligent and well read individual who eventually won great recognition for his literary endeavours. I’m just going to fade away with nothing to show for my misery, look at this very post you’re reading right now. My prose is awful, this is a mess, the only thing I believe might be worth appreciating is my emotional honesty. I wish I was clever, and more insightful, so I could fashion something from my pain that might help myself and others more easily understand or even just cope with this miserable life. Instead the opposite is true, I fall into a depression like this and I stop all productivity. I stop reading, my post about Parmenides will probably be delayed now. I knew this would happen, I hate myself.

I suppose I just managed to write five thousand words in an evening despite being very tired and rather distressed (slightly less because the quotes bump up the wordcount), but it’s a complete and total mess. Could I write something that would actually be presentable to the real world, will I be able to leave any kind of legacy to make up for all this hurt. I don’t know, I don’t want to fall into such a cope although I’ll admit this is the first idea I’ve had all day that’s making me feel slightly hopeful. I don’t think I have anything else to say though, I’ll just upload this now I think. Once again I am surprised, but it seems I did manage to finish this all in one evening. I think it’s better this way though, by tomorrow I’ll be better rested and while I don’t expect I’ll feel much better I won’t be able to capture the state of mind I’ve been in today. I’m not sure how things will turn out, but I’m pretty certain it’s going to be horrible whatever happens. Thanks for reading.