Drop

I had a mostly-good week. He said an incredibly insensitive thing that made it easier not to miss him. But this weekend has blown up into something approaching a full-on existential crisis and I'm back to sobbing uncontrollably.

It started brewing last week, when I realized that this is Memorial Day Weekend, and I'd requested Friday off in addition to the long weekend so Mike and I could go backpacking. Ohshitohshitohshit. Wait, never mind, I'm sure there are other people who'd like to go camping. I'll ask around.

Apparently most of my current local circle are in Tahoe right now at a birthday party I'm not invited to. (Great to find out that you're that one person in the circle who you don't invite because...? too uptight for real parties?) The rest of the local folks have longstanding plans with other people. (I need not remind y'all that I'm carless, right?) I kept asking. Eventually, I found a group, and I spent the rest of that week and this planning for a Sunday/Monday trip. I bought a few missing items from my backpacking kit which arrived today, borrowed a bear canister from friends, and I was about to start inventorying and packing when I got a message.

Backpacking canceled; my friend's recently-surgically-repaired knee is swollen and she can't walk on it. (It's a testament to the fucked way my head works that the first thing I thought was that I'm too much of a burden and they're going without me, but this was a good way to slough me off.)

The entire weekend stretches on in front of me like an unbroken field of glass, and I am standing naked at the edge of the field and must cross.

And now I'm sitting here at 1AM on Saturday, alone and still stranded carless on the Peninsula, writing this down because I feel like I have to mark for posterity how fucked this whole thing is.

In a desperate attempt to prop up my own mood, I walked to Safeway at 11:45 at night to get ice cream. Halfway there I had to stop and sob on a park bench in the dark, because I had the realization that so much of this comes down to feeling like I'm not good enough, that I'm never good enough, that I have to sacrifice myself for people and if they don't stay or don't give me the attention and love I desire, I feel like I'm a failure.

And I begin to think I am. A genetic cul-de-sac, conceived with just the wrong blend of anxiety and depression, intelligence and pride, and raised with not enough of the social skills necessary to succeed and thrive in this world with these things. I'm 34, and I am so tired of fighting on my own, and now I'm terrified that there is no hope of relief from that solo fight. I am not making enough money. I am smothered by the things I buy to stimulate my mind and make myself feel like I have some modicum of control over my world. I am too difficult to live with. I'm too uptight, too judgmental, too fat, too ambitious, too mean. I'm apparently not great with money. I'm lonely. My relationship with my parents isn't good. I feel like the people I call friends avoid me; and conversely many of the people who I wish to not associate with consider me one of them.

I miss feeling okay. I miss the optimism that it would all turn out alright soon. Or later, that it would all turn out alright, in the next few years. Or by the time I was 30. And now I'm looking down the barrel of middle age and terrified that the best years of my life were wasted trying to survive, and that the better years following them were wasted in fear and anxiety, and that it's all downhill from here. Turning and turning in the widening gyre.

I imagine my life as a quarter that's running itself around in ever-decreasing circles, and this is the rattling noise before it drops and lies still.

I am so tired. I'm sure I'll feel better after I sleep some.