The World’s Too Effing Small.

My friends from high school married their high school boyfriends, moved into houses in the same zip codes where their parents lived, but I, I could never follow….okay, okay, that’s a Dixie Chicks song, but that doesn’t make it any less true, right down to the zip code part.  They’ve never lived on their own, much less outside of the city where they grew up, and have had but 1 single relationship with a man in their entire lives.  They’ve never known heartbreak, or independence, or all the other crap I used to wish I’d never know, either. 

This post was written in my head Saturday evening at 5 pm as my family and I sat down to dinner at my favorite Mexican restaurant, only to see my ex-best-friend parade in with her husband, toddler, and infant….landing at a table 4 feet diagonal from me.  This is the kind of bullsh*t that happens to me all the time.  I can’t leave my house without being punished with a bitch former co-worker I never wanted to lay eyes on again, a former screwoff classmate who’s now rich while I’m poor, or basically any human that knew me before this day today.  I don’t want to see any of them.  I want to pretend that was all nightmares, or science-fiction-esque life memories implanted into my brain to terrorize me.  But apparently I am doomed to literally run into my past at every instance I believe I’ve outrun it. 

So there she was; the girl I went to summer camp with, the friend I watched SNL and Mystery Science Theater 3000 with until our stomachs practically broke from laughing so hard, my best friend from age 13 to 29…who I stopped speaking to three years ago. 

In all honesty, our friendship was over long before that.  When I left my fiancé at age 23, she wasn’t there for me, and I never really forgot it.  She didn’t ask me what happened, or rally support, or do basically anything you would expect a friend to do at the worst moment of your life.  When I quit my job and ended up unemployed for 4 years, she was nowhere to be found.  When the second most important relationship of my life ended, she was mysteriously absent once again.  And when I was in Nashville carrying out a plan to kill myself, she didn’t even know I was gone. 

Writing all of this makes me wonder how I still considered her my “Best Friend.”  Is it because she just always was, and I never thought to re-title her?  Or because I was maid of honor at her nuptials?  Maybe it was because I was the one she called when her baby was in the hospital with pneumonia.  I don’t know what I was hanging onto for so long, but I eventually DID let go.

I let go of the idea that she was going to one day become the friend that I needed.  The friend who would be there for me.  The friend who is there in good times…or bad times…or either, really, cuz she sucked at both.  It’s not that I didn’t give her chances.  Many.  It’s not that I didn’t tell her how I felt; this was my reward for doing that:

“The fact is, that like most adult friendships, I don't have a lot of time to give.  I'm sorry, but my job consumes 90% of my life during the school year.  What little energy I have left I have to give to my son and my husband. I feel incredibly guilty that my son spends 9 1/2 hours of his day at daycare.  I want to give him every free moment I have.  So, unfortunately, dinner every once in awhile is all I have to give.  I don't think this is all that uncommon among adult friendships.”

And STILL I gave it one more year after THAT!!!  God, I am such a doormat.  The final straw had to do with Austin, the place I moved to in the first place because none of my friends back home gave two fu*ks about me.  At my little going-away get-together, my 2 high school friends basically invited themselves to come stay with me over Spring Break.  Come November, one backed out; whatever.  Then a month before she was set to come, my ex-bestie tells me she can’t afford the trip. 

Bulllllllllllllshit, is what I say.  $300 bucks to come stay at my apartment for free, a luxury beyond her grasp?  As she posts on Facebook about getting a mani/pedi with the friend she’s blowing thousands to go on a Hawaii couples’ vacation with, forking over hundreds to do Ferrell’s and dye her hair blond in preparation for?  The same friend she goes to midnight showings of Twilight with, you know, who couldn’t be bothered for an hour dinner with me once a year? 

And why am I still angry about this sh*t?  I haven’t seen her in 4 years, and I would have been content for it to have been much longer.  A friend-ship is like any other relation-ship: there is the person who is actually before us (who we are usually incapable of seeing), and the person we wish-want-hope would be before us.  And there comes a day of reckoning when we accept that the image is hollow. 

Her last e-mail to me stated, “Now you've decided to shut me out for whatever reason, but I feel I deserve one last communication.”  SHE deserves?  She never got that last communication. 

I don’t mind being the petty one, or the stone cold bitch; I’ll be the one with the problem.  Cuz you know what, I don’t have to sit around wondering why she doesn’t give a sh*t about me anymore, and she doesn’t have to come up with excuses to blow me off.  Win-win.

Living in Alien-Nation

Guest post at The Unlost today: Living in Alien Nation: The Disconnection of The Masses:

What are you hiding?

RIGHT NOW, in this moment, what are you shoving down inside that familiar little lockbox that no one else gets the key to?

Who are you keeping “out there,” a comfortable arm’s length away? Who’s got YOU at a safe distance, just beyond the tips of their fingers?

And I bet there’s someone you’re faking it for, too (well, not THAT kind of faking). But yeah, I’d wager there’s somebody you’re being sickeningly nice to, and it makes you want to gag. And someone you act tough around, because they sure as hell aren’t going to see you vulnerable. You probably spend half your waking hours covering up how you actually feel, speaking words that bear no resemblance to what you really think.

And so, if I don’t really know who YOU are, and you don’t get to know who I am, you might as well be a friggin’ alien to me. We’re a whole nation of aliens, covering it all up, putting on the act for each other even whilst despising it.

It’s not really that I feel compelled to reveal my deepest, darkest secrets to everyone, but moreso the relentless pressure to hide them in favor of discussing things like The Bachelorette’s choice of goobers. Never do I feel quite so alienated as after I’ve been out with friends.

“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away— yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.“

– The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1836

If that quote hits you at ALL, you understand what I’m getting at. We go out and live it up with our friends, our smiles the very picture of connectedness, and yet we couldn’t be farther away from each other. We get back in our cars to drive home and, sh*t! There it is again, the utter alone-ness, the isolation that was supposed to have dissolved in the cocoon of camaraderie.

We feel unseen, and therefore unknown. We wanted so much more, and got so much less. We probably wouldn’t know how to construct a different experience if we tried, because the real, genuine us is buried too far beneath the appearances we must keep up.

We are the generation with 742 Facebook friends, 350 Twitter followers, 4 people who may or may not respond to an e-mail, 2 friends we grudgingly phone once in a while….and not even 1 damn person we’d dial at 3am when we’re on the bathroom floor asking the empty air why we feel so alone, so terrified, so lost.

Therese described this insane asylum we live in “where we all feel as if we’re the only ones struggling, as if we’re the only ones living a silent lie and plastering on a fake smile for the world to see,” and I can’t think of a more accurate description for it.

It wouldn’t be such a big deal if we were just hiding the petty stuff. But the truth is, we’re hiding despair. And fear. “And it’s killing us all.”

Sounds like an exaggeration…but it’s not. People die of alienation. I almost did.

So, start by being more real than you were yesterday. Keep up with what’s really going on with your friends, instead of the Kardashians. Quit telling everyone you’re fine, and start telling them you can’t fake it anymore. Maybe they can’t, either.

“Tell your truth. You never know who you’ll set free.”

Check out these follow-up posts: "My Representative"
& "AlienNation, Part 2: Breaking the Habit of YOU."

Have your own story?  E-mail me: downfromtheledge at yahoo dot com

Trail of Thoughts

A 60 year-old man with a thick gray mustache skateboarded by me on the trail this afternoon.

I thought to myself that this was more bizarre than the ferret I saw on the trail yesterday, which turned out to be a mink.

Then I realized that I was walking my cat, so who the f*ck am I to judge an elderly skateboarder.

Then I contemplated how walking my cat was more acceptable when I lived in the city whose motto is, “Keep Austin weird.”

Then I thought about how there’s cool-weird and there’s weird-weird, and pretended not to know which category catwalking would fall into.

Then I remembered telling my best friend in Austin that I was going to start a “PussyWalkers” Meetup group and join together with fellow freaks who push their pussies around.

Then I recalled actually starting an American Idol Meetup group at Mangia Pizza in downtown Austin and having only my 2 friends and one plump old lady named Turtle show up.

Then I recollected how this Meetup group led to me being interviewed by Nic Ciccone of Fox News Austin.

Then I cringed at what a mega-dork I was (am) and vowed to never appear on camera again. 

Then I asked myself why I continually do super-nerdish things despite knowing that they’re uncool.

Then I wondered if I would have more friends if I didn’t walk my cat.

Then I remembered that my friends still sucked even when I didn’t have a cat to walk.

Then I remembered that I got a cat because some new-agey chiropractor lady put colored sunglasses on me and told me that if I was lonely I should get a kitten.

Then I recalled thinking that this was the most expensive retarded advice anyone could give an abandoned unemployed suicidal person.

Then I realized that my pussy is still here with me, and not one person from the past 4-odd years of my life is still around.

Then I decided that I should hate that rich chiro bitch a little less. 

Then I wondered why I spent 40 minutes straining my eyes, unable to see sh*t on this laptop outside just so I could sit on my new chaise lounge. 

Then I told someone off in a really catty way and wondered if that made me a pussy. 

Then I decided that my cat is the only egotistical pussy I have to accept dealing with.

And then I decided this would be my last post written at a fourth-grade level. 

Is it better to have sucky friends, or no friends at all?

Right now I have a "chat" open on Facebook with a "friend" I have known for years, but never been all that close with.  I think I figured out why today.  It started with a feeling that I was asking-asking-asking too many questions; how's this?  How's that?  I just read through our entire interaction, which consists of me asking or commenting about something in her life.  At no point can I draw the conclusion that she is interested in anything going on in my life.  Not that there's much, but that's not the point! 

I find this pattern often in my life, and it irritates me.  Part of me wants to personalize it and assume, damn, I am the boring-est person on the planet; no one ever asks me how I'M doing!  However, I've spent my life as an observer, and concluded that - for MOST people - that stupid Toby Keith song is overly on-target: "Wanna talk about ME wanna talk about -I- wanna talk about NUMBER ONE..." 

And, really:  If I weren't so concerned about myself, I wouldn't feel so slighted...right? 

I'm USED to my life being about other people.  I grew up being the family toilet, on which everyone else dumps their proverbial crap.  I know all too well the feeling of people taking all you have to give, and handing nothing back.  And I think I've written a time or two about how fed up I am with that role.  It's so entrenched in my personality (and my gender?) that I don't know how *not* to focus on what others need and want...and yet that little voice that asks, "What about me?" is not completely suffocated.  Yet. 

So is it possible to be a giver and not attract takers?  Do takers ever stop sucking the life force out of you, and realize all you've done for them, suddenly overtaken with appreciation and a desire to return in kind?  Ummm....doubtful.  So how does the person who continually sets up this pattern change the dynamic of their relationships without changing their nature?  (That is, for those of us who aren't Mother Theresa, and don't give 100% selflessly.)

I have to recognize how I'm setting it up this way.  The fact that I hate talking about myself means I inherently choose to focus on others to deflect being the center of attention.  There are also a great many topics I'd rather not disclose on, so people probably learn quickly not to ask.  It's also difficult for people when you're not in a relationship - or seeking one - to withhold asking about your love life.  Everyone wants to know who you're dating, for how long, if you're getting married, then when, how many kids you'll have once you do, and so on till Kingdom Come.  So if that's not a focus in your life, they may feel at a loss as to what to talk to you about.  I get it.  Sometimes I wonder what I would ask myself about if I were anybody else. I could see how it might be difficult.  But there are also a thousand neutral subjects you can talk to any stranger about....if you choose to make an effort. 

And so, because she is doing what the rest of humankind does every hour of every day, I will try not to fault my friend for her egotism.  If I start to think about all the ways in which (the few friends I have left) fail to give a sh*t about me, I'll get into the mentality I was in a few years ago.  I moved across the friggin' country because no one in my life seemed to give a crap that I existed.  I stopped speaking to people who never seemed to have the time of day for me, like they did for their married friends or their rich friends or their cool friends...or whatever magical quality I imagined those people possessing which made them a more appealing companion than me. 

Because I can't *get* more from others, I try to *need* less.  And because it's really kind of impossible to need less than any other human being does, I settle for expecting less and squashing my own needs.  Or covering them up.  Or substituting things that really don't fill the void of what we're supposed to be getting from other people. 

"I expect more, but I get less."  (Says my grandpa the other day, in the nursing home)
"Well, maybe you should try expecting less, and you'll get more!"  (Responds my dad)

Therein lies the answer to all life's problems, methinks.

Life is pain, and other life lessons from House.

"LIFE is pain!  I wake up every morning, I'm in pain.  I go to work in pain.  You know how many times I wanted to just give up, how many times I've thought about ending it?"  -- Dr. Gregory House

It's not common for me to cry when I watch House, but something about that scene last Monday shook me in its familiarity.  I've had that rage for the greater part of four years.  Truly, you don't know what pain will do to you until it seizes hold of your life. 

But what enrages House in this scene is not his own despair, rather the notion that his cancer-stricken best friend is entitled to resign himself to death.  Which begs the question, whose life is it?  Do we owe our suffering to the people around us, if it means they can keep us around for their own benefit? 

There are certainly days (and weeks, and years) that I wasn't sticking around for my own sake, which implies that a part of me DOES feel obligated to endure my own circumstances to prevent the heartbreak of my loved ones.  Intellectually, however, I'm not sure that we owe anybody anything. 

The show's upcoming termination sucks.  Our society needed his character.  The endless drip of self-affirmative "Think Positive" -esque books and shows and slogans has dulled us into fake-a** shells.  Seems kind of backwards that ultra-positivity is cultivating sickness.  We don't even know WHAT we feel anymore, because we're not ALLOWED to feel it.  Give me some cynicism, sarcasm, and pessimism any day over plastered-on smiles. 

I remember when Jon Stewart had Barbara Ehrenreich on The Daily Show to discuss her book, "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America."  Ehrenreich scoffs at how you can't even get away with 'negativity' if you have cancer ... it's so true!  People will demand hope of you, with an insistence that you don't wallow, but rather remain ever-optimistic, with a mind-over-matter mentality.  So really, your average, ordinary breed of daily whining is intolerable. 

I know I definitely feel that my actual emotions are not acceptable to others.  If they were, I probably wouldn't have to write them here.  I probably wouldn't have to write a blog about suicide, because I probably wouldn't have become suicidal in the first place.  And I probably wouldn't have to write, period, because society would instead endorse open communication that accepts, rather than denies, all that is part of the human experience.   

Welcome Back to Society

No one really welcomes you back or asks why you've been gone so long.  But here I am, a functioning member of the human race.  Working.  Helping people.  Going to meetings and trainings and all that crap that makes one feel, "Ooh, I'm a professional."  It's true.  Just tell someone, "I have to go to a meeting" and you will instantly feel smug and important. 

                                           

-Professional- now there's something I haven't felt like in a long time...I just don't think there's anything like having a Master's degree and working temp jobs (or retail or sales) to make a person feel sh*tty about themselves.  You can tell someone till you're both blue in the face that happiness comes from the INside, and that you mustn't let external circumstances affect the way you feel about yourself.  Well, go ahead and test the theory.  Demean yourself to work at a crappy junk-pay job and try to think only positive things about your life and your future.  Try being just as proud to tell people where you work, and remember not to worry about what other people think.  Isn't that kind of a ridiculous expectation, anyway?  If you're really so insulated from the opinions of others, you might be a sociopath.  But I digress.

The point is, it was a long time coming.  4 years + 4 months, to be precise.  So if you were to ask what depression has cost me, it would have to be all that time.  All the wasted time.  Time in which I just couldn't get it together.  And yes, I get up by my alarm and I exercise and I do my hair and I brush my teeth and I go to work and I don't call in; things I haven't managed to do in all this time. Or maybe some of those things in one day but not all of them every day. I don't know how it became so hard or why it did, or even why it's not as hard now.  Which brings me to the conundrum of explanations.

I have a chunk of my life I can't really explain. If I could think of a great little [err...BIG] lie that would tie it all up in a nice pretty bow, that would just be really effing awesome.  But people ask random questions I'm not prepared for, and I suck at spontaneous answers.  I don't want to tell people about a past I wish didn't exist, or about friends that I USED to have, or relationships I used to be in.  And since I didn't just materialize out of thin air, people want to know stuff about me.  I'm sick of lying; I hate it.  It traps me in my past, feeling sucky about myself, because I don't even have a story to tell to cover up this mess.  For it to be "NEAT" it would have to be a great big whopper that explains all the contingencies.  So I tell little lies that keep me as close to the truth as possible, and avoid getting into any details. 

I think I'm just angry that, even when I overcome it, I don't really.  It's a stain on my life that won't wash out.  I've tried OxyClean and everything. 

"The truth may hurt for a little while, but a lie hurts forever."

Oh, what a tangled web we weave. 

Dry Ice

So last week on my way to sign paperwork for a new job, I drove by the grocery store that, in late fall of 2009, had dry ice in stock when I called every place in town trying to find it.  It seems a little surreal that I actually did that, you know, plan my death down to the last morbid detail of calculating how many dry ice packs would be required to preserve my body X amount of days so that it wouldn’t be AS awful when somebody found it.  As a courtesy (I feel), you should do that.  You should know what day you’re going to eat last, so that you can know there won’t be anything inside you.  And for Christ’s sake, you shouldn’t be found naked.

A week prior I had to get an I-9 notarized, which triggered a 2009 flashback to my “witness” questioning me admirably for being so responsible as to write a will at my young age.  Standing outside the notary public in Austin’s blazing July heat chatting with this stranger, I *knew* she wanted to know the dirt…does this chick have cancer?  She looks fine to me.  What in the world does a 27 year old need a will for?

Two weeks before that I was packing boxes to move and came across the shard of glass from a broken mirror, two packs of powdered aspirin, and the stashes of pills I still have stockpiled for some reason.  What, really, would be a good reason to hold onto your means and your backup plans for your backup plan? 

Luckily I’m not in therapy so I don’t have to answer that.  Sadly, I’ve never been to a counselor-psychologist-psychiatrist with the depth or skills to even GET to a question like that.  Even the people who are supposedly TRAINED to “go there” can’t actually do it, because it’s safer to talk about why you don’t have a job or how your family’s so screwed up.  But I digress.

My first suicide plan back in 2007 (link) was too hasty to encompass such minute details.  It was thrown together in half a day.  The second and third time around, the plan evolved to be more exhaustive.  I mulled over the minutiae laboriously as my cash ran out and an upcoming eviction notice loomed over me.  With the same furor I usually summoned to plan my life, I instead planned my death.  I reveled in having something to focus on besides the aching hole terrorizing my insides.

I stopped short of buying dry ice on my step-by-step plan, and still to this day have never stepped foot inside that particular store … have never even laid eyes on the place until the other day.  Life sprinkles all these coincidental little reminders in periodically to ensure you can’t escape from the memory of almost.  Almost not here. 

Once you’ve been suicidal, you can’t not be the person who went off the deep end.  You don’t get to be the stable, rational one with a good head on your shoulders anymore.  People view you as the equivalent of the hairline fracture in their coffee mug; for the most part you’re functional and they can sometimes hide the imperfection, but every once in a while the leak betrays itself and they’re never quite sure when you’re gonna up and crack bigtime.  And to be honest, I feel the same way about myself.  Even if you glued me or something, I’m still convinced I could bust open at any given moment. 

I remember Rappaport’s proposal from In Her Wake that people plan suicide as a way to cope with life.  If you perceive your situation as inescapable, you are trapped.  There is a perverse comfort you indulge in by planning your way out.  “If this gets to be too much, I enact the plan,” you tell yourself.  “If I can’t take it anymore, I know how to make the pain stop.”  (This is my grotesque version of paraphrasing a book I read almost three years ago).

Though a year’s gone by since my last serious inclination towards suicide, I think Rappaport might understand better than I why I still harbor the means to my demise.  Not a day goes by that I can’t find a book or soup ladle or other random possession I’ve forgotten I got rid of that summer in Austin.  Sometimes I think parts of myself were discarded along with my belongings, and I’m not allowed to forget it.