I appear to be on this trend where I start the week OK and then by Thursday/Friday I’m a complete wreck.
Yesterday’s post seemed so important to write at the time. All those thoughts and feelings were like a hairball that I needed to cough up so it wasn’t just rotting me from the inside out. But now that I’ve been called an insensitive twat by enough of the Internet, I’m starting to wonder. Not everybody who talked to me about the blog today was trying to make me feel bad for being so dumb, but a majority were.
Should I listen to what total strangers on Reddit have to say about my shitty attitude?
No.
Did I?
Yes.
Oh well.
I should have sat on it some more. But at 2am, 1,000 words in, and without a single scrap of anything else I could throw together, I did the honorable thing and I fell on my publish button. I’m not always going to write good stuff. And everybody’s definition of ‘good stuff’ is different. When you get down to it, I’ll never write good stuff.
It all started last night when we were driving from the West side across downtown to the play, and I was having the twitter conversation that would ultimately lead to me thinking I just had to expose the clean, hard truth of the privilege troll (as cunty as it is, I still stand by my statement that they are bad for discourse). The traffic was horrible. Everywhere. Coming up on the theater my friend and I had some backfat eater lay on the horn for an. entire. city. block. Then on the way home in the middle of the night, the whole fucking skyline was completely yellow with artificial light. You couldn’t see a single star. All I could think about was how much I hate this place. Then today I was running on basically no sleep (what else is new?), I was getting shit for that blog, I had sort of a weird combo food/cookies lunch, and I’m (possibly stupidly) trying to launch yet another thing to keep my mind occupied low these lonely days in this cursed shit city. Oh, and the main character in the book I’m reading is in mortal fucking danger right now.
I came home from work so tired that I took my shoes off and went straight to bed. Instead of sleeping, of course I started contemplating the nature of my depression. The end of the week used to mean a weekend, a break, a chance to see my friends and have some fun. Now it just means another week I wasted in L.A. Another mile of road I’ll never drive again. I’m exhausted. I spend the entire week like a fly in a bottle, and even when I stick to my no work on Saturday rule, there’s still thinking and planning to be done.
I feel like a failure for being unhappy and still staying here, for every lame weekday joke I tell, for every second I sit politely in traffic, or in my cube, and every agonizing hour I lay quietly in bed without sleeping. The weeks of my life are running away like water and all the things I try to make just stagnate or fall apart. As constant and unyielding as it is, my effort appears to be meaningless. Even a depressive episode that only lasts a day or even a few hours can seem to convince me it’s been there my whole life. All I could think of was how I was unhappy living in a car making 800 bucks a month, and how I’m unhappy now in this moment. So I’ll probably be unhappy everywhere I go and in everything I do. Eventually I decided that I was born empty.
On the one hand, I am sort of right. I have a hole in me that can’t be filled with things, or praise, or achievement. I mean, why do you guys think I’m in a 12 step program? The sucking vacuum of my need could swallow this entire planetary system and that wouldn’t even count. Because I’m using the wrong measuring stick, and I’m measuring the wrong things with it. Years ago, I realized that there is an immeasurable and innumerable human value that comes from inside a person and makes them whole. Sometimes I wonder if I have it. Usually the answer is no. Today the answer wasn’t just no, but never.
So I started crying so loud that Ben could hear me in the living room, and he had to come in and fuck me right again. He also did all the normal good boyfriend + crying girlfriend stuff, but when I’m like that and I can’t sleep, there’s really only one other thing to do about it. Afterwards we went and got sushi and donuts. We’re trying to cut back on our spending since I basically drained my savings twice over in one year, but sometimes you have to do a little irresponsible thing (like eating out) so you don’t feel tempted to do the really irresponsible thing (like quit without notice, pack the pets, leave the shit, and drive to Seattle with only our last paychecks to keep us warm at night).
Besides, donuts.