This was written several years ago and does not necessarily reflect my current opinions.
Leave it to me to write something like this and then disprove it unthinkingly within a matter of weeks. This morning (I've been sleeping afternoons/evenings, so I had been up at 7am for about 7 hours already), after listening to a bunch of Our Lady Peace songs over and over (Clumsy, Thief, Big Dumb Rocket, and others), having discovered that their lyrics are actually pretty dark, I wanted to put something different on. So I added all the songs that a certain friend of mine had uploaded to me to my playlist. Upon reaching I Know Him So Well, I told myself to control my emotions; not to let myself get too sad or lonely or anything. Well, I totally broke down. I was massively in tears by the end of the song.
I left my room and went on a long (probably over an hour) walk through random parts of Pittsburgh, despite the fact that I had homework to do (and I still have it, and it's due at midnight today, and now I'm typing this rather than working on it.) I thought about a lot of things on that walk. I thought about how little control over myself I really have; it's just that I've been unable to feel, it's not that I've got such fine-grained control of my feelings. I thought mostly about my ex-girlfriend, Alison.
I know she's over me and that my feelings mean little or nothing to her now, for a bunch of reasons:
And I would have killed myself, if killing myself were one of the options that I was able to entertain. As is I realize that I will take actions which in the short run prevent me from dying—move out of the way of (or keep out of the way of) a moving car, for example—but I have little survival instinct beyond that.
And to be honest, right now the emotional impact of that to me is roughly zero—well, I mean, it's immense, but it's integrated into me so fundamentally that it never strikes me much any more. Do I think I'm better off without Alison, since I broke up with her, since she wasn't fulfilling my need to use her as a tool to feel good about myself for having someone that actually cared about me, someone to whom I was special, to whom the mere fact that something was “from me” was enough to excite? I don't know. I'm such a massive ball of pain right now that I don't especially care either, to be honest. I am pretty sure that she is better off without me, but that doesn't matter either.
You know what occurs to me right now? If you're anyone other than me and you're reading this, think about just how massive the gulf between your understanding of my situation and mine is. Even Alison herself hasn't been in actual contact with me for long enough that she couldn't understand what's going on with me now. My other friends, I don't know how to describe it (I don't have many of them) but there's just no way for them to understand, no way to bridge the gap between having gone through the shit that is my life and just hearing about it.
Anyway, besides that even, I'm ranting. Trying to get out all the thoughts you had in an hour and a half walk as fast as possible before you lose them isn't a good thing for coherence. Not to mention that probably some of these thoughts have been circulating for longer than that in my head anyway. Fortunately my typing ability at the moment seems to be relatively good. I guess I should count my blessings... oh, what the fuck am I saying, I don't have any.
I wish I could give myself a task, some direction, for the summer. What I anticipate happening is a miniature version of what absolutely terrifies me might occur when I graduate from college—spending all my term on meaningless crap that doesn't get me anywhere, total social isolation, etc. My job won't save me from that, in fact it will encourage it. Though it pays quite well and it isn't too hard, it hardly gives me a creative outlet. In fact, I have no creative outlets—though I guess that's to a large extent due to the fact that once I start a project, unless it's for school or something I rarely if ever bother to finish it, so as I noticed this pattern, I didn't even bother to start things as often.
I like this ranting, though, in a way. Well, maybe “like” is too strong a word, but it distracts me from my pain. The fact that it's public means that other people might see it (that's a definition, damn) which constrains what I say in certain ways. I'm not looking for sympathy, believe me—I can see why someone would misinterpret me to be saying that, but save your caring for somebody who's not drowning in pain, someone you actually have a prayer of helping. Besides, I don't deserve your help. I don't deserve anything, and even worse, I have no desire to work so as to earn the desert of anything. I'm not content to be worthless, but I am stuck there.
Is writing this an effective thing for me to do? Is it likely to achieve anything? No. I had the idea of over the summer writing a piece of software which would allow me to organize my thoughts and then mapping out whatever occurs to me (like any project, I'll probably end up never doing it, but at least that's the thought that I had). Writing a webpage based on that, or just making a webpage period, was another idea I had. But millions of people have personal webpages. I've read some of them, and to be honest, they are only special if you know that person. They mean more or less nothing otherwise. And since no one truly cares about me, anyone who stumbles upon this meaningless little excuse for a web page will likely leave it before even having reached this point, thus writing this is worthless as is everything in my life.
Can I see any way I can be happy? Not really. I'm desperate. Another thought I had while on my walk is that love is the flipside of desperation. Or maybe that's just me, but anyway, the way it goes is that loving someone means having an empty spot in your soul when they're gone. Does Alison have an empty spot in her soul? I don't think so. It may take time, but she's already over me; she'd probably be ready to meet someone new already. Meanwhile my mood swings back and forth like mad, but I know that any relationship I started right now would be seriously fucked up, and I really don't see how I'm going to heal. I don't see how I can maintain the farce that my life will ever amount to anything any more.
Fuck it. I can't write any more except to say that I know that if I died now, my life would be a failure, so all my achievement must be in my future, if there ever will be any; but I don't see things changing in such a drastic manner that I'm able to accomplish my goals. Only dogma keeps me from killing myself; a deep dogma, but one which I sometimes have genuine doubts is a beneficial one.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Fri May 4 09:14:39 EDT 2001