Earlier this week I reminded somebody the entire reason I'm making all of these changes is because I don't want to die alone. Sure, the world is full of people who die alone. Thousands of people a day die alone. I don't want to be one of them.
This week I've been having a lot of nightmares. On Monday morning, my alarm woke me out of a nightmare about a woman cutting off my Mr. Happy. She was laughing and just as the alarm woke me, the blood was beginning to gush. And it really hurt.
That nightmare probably says more about how I react to women than I'd spell out in plain words.
I don't hate women. Quite the contrary. I fear them. I'm terrified by them. I see them as either a friend or a vicious, carnivorous predator ready to rip organs out of my body and feast upon them. When I see a beautiful woman, I see claws, fangs, and bloodlust.
No grey area, either. One or the other.
It's part of the reason I seek out women who are unobtainable. My dream girl is over 1000 miles away, totally out of my league if we were to meet face-to-face, and possibly married. Knowing I'll never meet her is best. Knowing she'll keep me her dark secret is even better. Sure, it sucks she'll never tell her friends about the weird guy in the creepy van, but it's best this way.
But all of that doesn't matter. It really doesn't.
Within 24 hours of being happy, I will self-destruct. I will ruin everything and totally make a huge mess of things. I've done it way too many times.
If the most intelligent, witty, kind, and beautiful woman came to me and told me she felt a connection with me, within 24 hours I would do something stupid to drive a wedge between us. I would tell her something about myself out of context that would make her realize I was a mistake. It would be the truth, but it would be a random thing out of context, and she would have to realize things were wrong.
I self destruct whenever things are going well. I don't know why.
I've lost weight. I've made progress. I've been doing so well. But too many people have complimented me and encouraged me. I've been starting to feel like I'm not a waste of flesh and that there might be a better future than the one I imagined.
So, I've been eating carbs. I've been eating chocolate, ice cream, and bread sticks.
I can blame all kinds of things. Budget, food costs, etc. But no, this is me self destructing again.
I can't stop it. I have to destroy anything that brings me happiness or puts me on a path to a better life. And I don't know why I do it. I just don't.
One of the reasons I've stopped connecting with women was because I just can't bring myself to hurt another one with my self destructive instincts. It's instinct at this point--I just do it without even thinking about it. And it kills me to know how badly I've hurt women who cared about me.
I don't know why I do that. I really don't.
I keep going back to that quote from Milton's Paradise Lost they used in the movie The Crow.
Am I really that bad?
I can't be, but somehow I have developed a self-perception that is and it has tainted everything around me.
I keep going back to a memory from not too long ago. I cared about her, she told me she cared about me. And then the clock started to tick. Within 24 hours it was done. I'd fucked it all up.
Again.
I was furious with myself. I still am. And it still hurts. Just 24 hours and I'm still angry at myself for fucking it all up. I hurt a woman deeply just because she was stupid enough to care about a guy like me.
I'm working on sorting this out. Last week I had the realization that all of my perceptions of self, since as far back as I can remember, were based on the valuation given by broken people with issues. People who were deeply hurt and from painful pasts who could only cope with alcohol and violence and rage.
When I was three and a half years old, I watched my babysitter throw her drunken husband down a flight of stairs and proceed to beat him with a vacuum hose while he begged her to stop. I was sitting at the base of the stairs. I pulled my knees up to my chest and covered my eyes with my hands while I shook with fear.
When I was about four and a half or five, somebody giving me a bath suddenly flew into a rage, grabbed me by the back of my head, and shoved my head under the water. They held it there for a long time and I was certain I was going to die. I ran out of air and let go, knowing that was how it was going to end. Then, they suddenly pulled me up out of the water. They were pale, shaking, and crying. We went downstairs to have some orange juice and never spoke of it again.
Food healed the hurt that night and made it all better. Another pattern I need to work on.
Somehow, I took moments like that, and instead of assigning blame to the people doing the deeds, I turned them around on myself. I somehow twisted events like that into meaning that I was a bad person. I have no idea how that bit of logic worked out but that's what I did.
I thought, for my entire life, there was something fundamentally and centrally flawed about me as a human being when all along it wasn't about me. Even decades ago, when I learned it wasn't about me, I kept the original self worth and self identity. Despite knowing and understanding the world I grew up in, I maintained the flawed perspective that got me into this mess.
The old lens through which I looked at myself is falling apart and good riddance. I am working on developing a new one. For so long, I always saw myself reflected in the eyes of others. So when somebody liked me, I instantly thought they were somehow flawed themselves, and of poor judgement. I knew who and what I was, why didn't they?
I am now re-thinking and reinventing everything I knew about myself. I am looking at how I came to believe in who and what I am, then trying to see where those perceptions were false. I have no clue what to do after that.
I have people who are helping me and guiding me along but this is scary shit sometimes. But sometimes, it's like being able to re-take a driver's license photo. I get to have a more honest appraisal of who I am.
I have to fix this. I just have to. I'm self destructing in a thousand ways with a dozen choices every hour. I don't want to die alone because I have the instincts of a Kamikaze pilot with a hundred kills painted on my side. But more importantly, I can't hurt any more women. I just can't. I feel so horrible already and knowing I can't control this makes it worse.
After a while, it becomes just another sick cosmic joke. The guy with severe abandonment issues self destructs when he finds anything close to happiness. You can only tell a woman you're sorry so many times before they start to think you're doing it all on purpose. Or worse, they realize just how far gone you are mentally, and how they need to run. You feel like a monster when that happens. Inhuman. It's hard to apply the new self valuation and perceptions of self when she's backing away like a woman in Hannibal Lecter's kitchen after she sees a couple of toes in the garbage disposal.
A lot is changing. I know that I am changing, too. I am changing in the most positive way I know how and with the help and aid of friends who genuinely care about me. I'm not sure who I am but I am starting to narrow it down a bit more every day. I'm very curious about what I'll come up with.
Yet I have structured my entire life to keep women away. Not at a distance. Not at a certain length. Away. Totally and completely away.
Oddly enough, all but a couple of my closest friends are women, but we can ignore that. Nothing is going on with any of them. No friends with benefits, no friends with an occasional hook up, or anything like that.
In fact, my friends don't talk about sex at all with me. I love that about them. I love not hearing about their sex lives and I love that all but one never sends me naked pics of themselves.
I'm not like other men. I know this about myself. I don't watch porn, and in the past few years, all things sexual have become abhorrent to me. To say I get uncomfortable when a woman talks about her sex life is an understatement.
This week I've been having a lot of nightmares. On Monday morning, my alarm woke me out of a nightmare about a woman cutting off my Mr. Happy. She was laughing and just as the alarm woke me, the blood was beginning to gush. And it really hurt.
That nightmare probably says more about how I react to women than I'd spell out in plain words.
I don't hate women. Quite the contrary. I fear them. I'm terrified by them. I see them as either a friend or a vicious, carnivorous predator ready to rip organs out of my body and feast upon them. When I see a beautiful woman, I see claws, fangs, and bloodlust.
No grey area, either. One or the other.
It's part of the reason I seek out women who are unobtainable. My dream girl is over 1000 miles away, totally out of my league if we were to meet face-to-face, and possibly married. Knowing I'll never meet her is best. Knowing she'll keep me her dark secret is even better. Sure, it sucks she'll never tell her friends about the weird guy in the creepy van, but it's best this way.
But all of that doesn't matter. It really doesn't.
Within 24 hours of being happy, I will self-destruct. I will ruin everything and totally make a huge mess of things. I've done it way too many times.
If the most intelligent, witty, kind, and beautiful woman came to me and told me she felt a connection with me, within 24 hours I would do something stupid to drive a wedge between us. I would tell her something about myself out of context that would make her realize I was a mistake. It would be the truth, but it would be a random thing out of context, and she would have to realize things were wrong.
I self destruct whenever things are going well. I don't know why.
I've lost weight. I've made progress. I've been doing so well. But too many people have complimented me and encouraged me. I've been starting to feel like I'm not a waste of flesh and that there might be a better future than the one I imagined.
So, I've been eating carbs. I've been eating chocolate, ice cream, and bread sticks.
I can blame all kinds of things. Budget, food costs, etc. But no, this is me self destructing again.
I can't stop it. I have to destroy anything that brings me happiness or puts me on a path to a better life. And I don't know why I do it. I just don't.
One of the reasons I've stopped connecting with women was because I just can't bring myself to hurt another one with my self destructive instincts. It's instinct at this point--I just do it without even thinking about it. And it kills me to know how badly I've hurt women who cared about me.
I don't know why I do that. I really don't.
I keep going back to that quote from Milton's Paradise Lost they used in the movie The Crow.
Am I really that bad?
I can't be, but somehow I have developed a self-perception that is and it has tainted everything around me.
I keep going back to a memory from not too long ago. I cared about her, she told me she cared about me. And then the clock started to tick. Within 24 hours it was done. I'd fucked it all up.
Again.
I was furious with myself. I still am. And it still hurts. Just 24 hours and I'm still angry at myself for fucking it all up. I hurt a woman deeply just because she was stupid enough to care about a guy like me.
I'm working on sorting this out. Last week I had the realization that all of my perceptions of self, since as far back as I can remember, were based on the valuation given by broken people with issues. People who were deeply hurt and from painful pasts who could only cope with alcohol and violence and rage.
When I was three and a half years old, I watched my babysitter throw her drunken husband down a flight of stairs and proceed to beat him with a vacuum hose while he begged her to stop. I was sitting at the base of the stairs. I pulled my knees up to my chest and covered my eyes with my hands while I shook with fear.
When I was about four and a half or five, somebody giving me a bath suddenly flew into a rage, grabbed me by the back of my head, and shoved my head under the water. They held it there for a long time and I was certain I was going to die. I ran out of air and let go, knowing that was how it was going to end. Then, they suddenly pulled me up out of the water. They were pale, shaking, and crying. We went downstairs to have some orange juice and never spoke of it again.
Food healed the hurt that night and made it all better. Another pattern I need to work on.
Somehow, I took moments like that, and instead of assigning blame to the people doing the deeds, I turned them around on myself. I somehow twisted events like that into meaning that I was a bad person. I have no idea how that bit of logic worked out but that's what I did.
I thought, for my entire life, there was something fundamentally and centrally flawed about me as a human being when all along it wasn't about me. Even decades ago, when I learned it wasn't about me, I kept the original self worth and self identity. Despite knowing and understanding the world I grew up in, I maintained the flawed perspective that got me into this mess.
The old lens through which I looked at myself is falling apart and good riddance. I am working on developing a new one. For so long, I always saw myself reflected in the eyes of others. So when somebody liked me, I instantly thought they were somehow flawed themselves, and of poor judgement. I knew who and what I was, why didn't they?
I am now re-thinking and reinventing everything I knew about myself. I am looking at how I came to believe in who and what I am, then trying to see where those perceptions were false. I have no clue what to do after that.
I have people who are helping me and guiding me along but this is scary shit sometimes. But sometimes, it's like being able to re-take a driver's license photo. I get to have a more honest appraisal of who I am.
I have to fix this. I just have to. I'm self destructing in a thousand ways with a dozen choices every hour. I don't want to die alone because I have the instincts of a Kamikaze pilot with a hundred kills painted on my side. But more importantly, I can't hurt any more women. I just can't. I feel so horrible already and knowing I can't control this makes it worse.
After a while, it becomes just another sick cosmic joke. The guy with severe abandonment issues self destructs when he finds anything close to happiness. You can only tell a woman you're sorry so many times before they start to think you're doing it all on purpose. Or worse, they realize just how far gone you are mentally, and how they need to run. You feel like a monster when that happens. Inhuman. It's hard to apply the new self valuation and perceptions of self when she's backing away like a woman in Hannibal Lecter's kitchen after she sees a couple of toes in the garbage disposal.
A lot is changing. I know that I am changing, too. I am changing in the most positive way I know how and with the help and aid of friends who genuinely care about me. I'm not sure who I am but I am starting to narrow it down a bit more every day. I'm very curious about what I'll come up with.
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