2024-05-18

Distractions

Two trinities

Another girl from the crazy people program has a crush on me. Jesus Christ, why the fuck am I so indifferent? I'm all smug about it, but it doesn't cheer me up at all. That girl disgusts me. She's so ugly, which I wouldn't mind, but she's also completely broken. I guess she's "nice", in that she doesn't seem like a potential psychopath, but I don't see myself in a relationship with her. It would be way too much work.

Basically I now know for a fact that there are three girls who at some point in the past 3 months have had a crush on me. It's a very nice ego boost, sure, but… I feel nothing. It doesn't cheer me up at all.

Last night I had a vague dream about my ex, probably because I went to bed with a familiar sense of bodily loneliness. I woke up with vague fantasies of cuddling and being hugged by someone. I suppose this is why this subject is on the forefront of my mind now.

There's a very annoying dichotomy in my mind. Or more like a trichotomy. There's the simplest part of me, the horny part, the one that just wants sex, to touch tits, to have someone who'd stroke my cock. This one almost immediately disappears after I masturbate, and ever since I went back on SSRIs, it's been mostly absent.

The second part is the one that I woke up with. It's the part of me that craves physical touch and affection. I would still describe this feeling as "horniness" because it does involve physical touch, and thoughts of this sort of touch do light something up in my underwear. The difference is that this part doesn't go away, not even immediately after masturbation, and it is not suppressed by SSRIs. It's this part that finds certain girls cute – not in a vulgar "she's hot" way, but in a subtler way that looks at facial features, fashion choices and mannerisms – and it's this part that drives me to seek out a relationship.

Finally, there is the "rational" part of me, or at least the self-denying part. It's this aspect of my mind that powers the voice inside my head and it's this part that keeps trying to convince me that I should let go, that I should find my own happiness, that I don't actually enjoy the company of any of these girls – indeed, the more "plausible" the idea of a relationship with a woman is, the more stressful it is to talk to her.

I always try to imagine the moments after sex. During the months when the relationship with my ex started fraying at the edges, these were the worst moments. The horniness is gone, the need for affection and the need for sex have been satiated, and now it's just the two of us, people who need to hang around each other. And it's in these moments that I most vividly remember realizing I don't actually like her. There was nothing to talk about. It was awkward. It was stilted, and didn't feel natural. Everything felt forced, like conversations between coworkers. I did not genuinely enjoy spending time with this person. Her sense of humor annoyed me, her childishness disgusted me, and her deep misanthropy horrified me.

I try to imagine these moments with the girls who gave me attention. I try to imagine hanging out with any of them without the sexual tension. I hate it. I dislike all three. One is a crazy unstable borderline who speaks in endless riddles and lies. Second is immature, awkward, and awfully boring. Third is a completely dysfunctional freak who doesn't even shower regularly. A cold pro/con analysis would say the second is the "best" one, but I just genuinely don't find her attractive. Besides, am I really such a psychopath that I can reduce these things to cold pro/con analyses?

The most obvious advice would be to follow my heart, but, as stated before, my heart is divided. My dick easily wants the first one, and my need for affection would be fine with either of the first two. But my superego tells me I should avoid all three.

It's been a year. Almost a year, at least. Remaining alone at this point… well, it's just sad, isn't it? I need to finally move on, and perhaps getting into a new relationship, even a short-term and "fake" one, is what I need to heal from that break-up. Or maybe it's just excuses my sex-starved id feeds me to make the cognitive dissonance go away.

Yet here I am, comparing people like they're race horses. I don't actually care about any of them, and still I contemplate lying about it. My therapist says I shouldn't be so harsh on myself when I have these thoughts, because it is "only natural" that I would seek out affection like that, which is true, but I am not a pitiable wallflower longing for someone to come along and notice me. I think and behave like a predator. I pick between targets. In the deeper recesses of my selfish heart, I really just want to have all three women (or, really, just the first two) available to me on a casual friends-with-benefits basis, just so I'll have someone to fuck. I want the first one because she's exceptionally hot, and I want the second one on the off chance she'll grow on me, and that through a greater degree of intimacy she'll open up and I'll learn to love her.

But then again – has there ever been a person I enjoyed spending time with?

This is the fundamental question that sent me down an unfamiliar path just about two months ago. This was a question the first girl asked me. And my immediate answer is "no". But I've had so many doubts and thoughts about that question and that answer since then. Is it true? Have I really never made a genuine human connection? How come? What about my family? Oh wait, I don't actually care about my family, I only care for the things they provide me. What does it really mean to enjoy spending time with someone? I remember having really interesting conversations. It was rare, but on a few rare moments I had fun talking to someone for so long that I just didn't want to stop. This is what I want from any future relationship – I want someone who'll be my friend. But even the select few people with whom I enjoyed talking were men. I can never reach that level with a woman. Well, there have been approximations; there's another girl in that program that I do find it easier and more fun to talk to, but she has a boyfriend, and even with her it's only "easy" because she takes charge, and will usually fill in silences and provide for more topics to keep the conversation going.

I hate this so much. Why do I struggle with shit that most other people don't even notice? Why do I find making friends so hard? I used to think that the secret to being likable and making friends is to be "cool", or "sophisticated", or "funny", or otherwise an interesting person that people would want to hang around with. I still get that urge sometimes, but I now find this entire endeavor mentally exhausting, morally wrong and ultimately counterproductive.

Now I use empathy and fake wisdom to snare women. I did it with my ex, and I do it now. I pretend I'm more well-balanced, independent and caring than I really am. That's why those girls had a crush on me – and it wasn't a real crush anyway. All three have one thing in common, which is that they're as desperate as I really am. The see the image I present, and find it attractive because they hope I can heal the wound in their souls. But I can't. I am as wounded as any of them. I'm a fraud. In reality, I'm just a sex-brained weasel. I am completely dependent on others' validation for my own self-worth. I'm not sensitive. I am not unthreatening. I am an emotional hazard to myself and to others.

If I've never genuinely enjoyed spending time with anyone, then does that make me an introvert? I clung to the "introvert" label for a while there, back in my more isolated days of endless running on the hedonic treadmill of the internet. But have I actually enjoyed any of that? Or was it all distractions? The second option seems more intuitive now. I've been getting back into my old habits of spending too much time getting swallowed up in YouTube videos, or video games, or TV shows (well, a show). I force myself to pay attention as I play or watch something, and I now find it easier to 'enjoy' these things. But it doesn't feel like real enjoyment. It feels like addictions. Momentary distractions to keep my mind occupied.

So what does it mean to enjoy something? I don't fucking know anymore.

Smoking

I've been smoking a lot more often again. Like, a fuckton. I've spent more than one day recently being high from morning until dusk. This is after a dry spell that lasted almost two months.

It's weird, because the effect weed has on me has been changing. Weed used to make me terribly anxious. I felt like I was losing control, which, for my highly regimented mind and intricate webs of lies, was a disaster. I still get that sometimes, but I've been trying to avoid it. When bad thoughts come, I notice them, and just try to focus on something outside myself. It doesn't always work, but stuff like video games and podcasts make it easier. I've been regaining the ability to distract myself. It's a form of regression, I know, but I see no other choice. I've been mentally torturing myself for almost a year now. I'm tired of feeling like shit.

Repeated in-mind interventions and also familiarity have made weed tolerable at first, and now it's reached the point where it's enjoyable. Especially after the first wave of that first bowl dissipates, the feeling of being high is just a soft pillow that cushions reality.

I think this is a positive development. I strongly suspect that weed amplifies experiences, and the anxiety I've felt smoking it was nothing other than the innate anxiety I always live with. Learning to let things go, to stop ruminating over every little detail, and to just focus on either the world or its distractions is valuable. I've been feeling better when sober, too.

This is not the first time that I reach this point. I had such periods of intensive smoking in the past. Never when I was with my ex (I suspect part of my problem with weed is that when I first started smoking I've conditioned myself to associate it with sex, like some Pavlovian dog), but since the break-up it happened once or twice. I know that, around people, it would still cause me to go into panic. This is the ultimate proof for me that, no, I am not free yet. I don't feel "myself" or genuinely relaxed around people. I only learned to manage the symptoms.

There is always a tightness in my body when I'm around people. It takes a lot of effort to make it go away. Alcohol used to do it – but that was only because my belief in alcohol doing it helped me. The power has been within me all along, but I just can't seem to find the off-switch for caring about what others think of me.

I used to love to "let go", but I've never actually let go. "Letting go" was to pretend that other people aren't around me, or to forget about their existence. Noticing I am not alone always pulled me crashing down back to reality. It's even worse when I really am alone, because I often still feel as if I am being watched. Not in a literal, paranoid schizophrenic sort of way, but in a sense that I need to actively remind myself that I am alone to finally feel okay with myself and with what I do. Nobody is watching, so I can dance along to the music, or walk around in my underwear, or do stupid and silly stuff.

What I wish more than anything else, is to meet a girl with whom I can effortlessly feel that way. Where I don't need to pretend to be alone – where I can just be around her, without feeling uncomfortable at all.

That sort of freedom can only come if I can be sure I will not be judged, and that in turn can only come in one of two ways: Either I am absolutely convinced the other person likes me for who I am, or I simply don't care about whether I am judged or not. Option 2 doesn't seem feasible to me. But is Option 1 really an option at all?

I think this is what I want. This is what "love" means to me. To be around another, and to be accepted. This is not unconditional love, because unconditional love is what you get from a dog. I want conditional love, where I – as I really am, without any lies or acting or even thought going into it – satisfy all conditions.

Distractions

Being able to distract myself from my problems is not happiness. I fucked up a lot of my life doing that. At certain moments, I suspect that's how I fucked up the relationship with my ex. Escapism is fundamentally unhealthy, but what other coping mechanisms am I supposed to employ? Even if my depression is surmountable and my anxiety can be managed, I can't distract myself out of a crushing sense of loneliness. I already tried that, during multiple periods of my life. It works for a while, but in the end it all just comes crashing back down.

Is any of what I write here real? I suspect not, at least not for this document. This letter doesn't come from a purely emotional place, because my emotions are bottled up for the time being.

Even when I do write emotionally, does it make what I write more "real"? What is truth, anyway? I can't seem to grasp onto anything inside myself. I'm indecisive, and confused. My thoughts keep running in so many directions, and I never seem to be able to aggregate them into a cohesive whole.

I am mercurial. My internal essence seems to remain more-or-less stable, but my ability to express it is insufficient, and I keep jumping between different aspects of myself to emphasize. Is this mental illness? Am I disturbed? Try as I might, I cannot construct an internal narrative for myself. Who am I? What is my story? Why do I do what I do? Why do I think what I think? What exactly do I even think?

I make up narratives as I go along. I switch them out as needed. I internalize things that others say about me, and then spit them out as soon as a new costume is ready. I will say and do whatever needed to keep a consistent image of myself for others, even if internally I no longer identify with that momentary figure. Snap decisions have months-long consequences.

Who I am is fundamentally tied to who I am with at the moment. Meta-narratives turn into plain narratives, which turn into lies and illusions. It's awful. I don't know why I keep doing what I do. I just need more and more distractions from myself. This is why I want a girlfriend so bad: Because it's a distraction. It's another thing I can do. I know I love masturbation and sex, because they're great distractions and time sinks, and that's why I want to fuck someone again.

And yet, knowing and verbalizing these things (I hesitate to call them "facts") doesn't bring me any sort of relief. Saying essentially that I am a bad person who doesn't deserve affection doesn't make the desire for affection go away. It doesn't make me feel bad about myself, either. It is, after all, just another distraction.