mahiwaga

On R’s advice (as you can see, I am very suggestible), I headed up to the Central Coast and am hanging around Cambria and vicinity (which includes such places as Cayucos, San Simeon, Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, Atascadero, Templeton, and Paso Robles, among others.) Mostly, I just want to stare at the sea. (There is clearly something very wrong with me.)

I was supposed to take this time and focus my thoughts. Maybe try to figure out what I need to do with my life. Maybe even put some ideas down to paper (or at least HTML.) Ambitious things like that.

Instead, I find myself combing through old things I have written and then abandoned, briskly written snippets that fail to develop plot or character, or skeletal summaries of what I want to happen, with very little actual text to back it up. This activity has rapidly degenerated into reading old e-mails. I actually have a lot of messages archived all the way back to 1998. I have some stray e-mails from college (1994-1998) but most of them I wiped out deliberately. Lots of painful, ridiculous shit.

Interestingly, though, I have a pretty thorough archive of the e-mails I composed in 1995 and 1996. These chronicle my disastrous breakup with N and my subsequently even more disastrous infatuation with A. After that, my non-existent love life is documented mostly on paper, although I’ve blogged a few pointless episodes here and there.

I must say, it is interesting to note how I have dealt with a decade of being alone.

In other words, I haven’t learned a goddamned thing. But reading through those tortured e-mails is really interesting from a textual point-of-view. The progression from those blood-drenched, tear-stained epistles of utter despair, to my initial foray into blogging, to my current writing style is kind of amusing to observe. In a lot of ways, my writing has actually changed for the worse. But I think I am a lot saner now. I’ve still got a full-blown Axis I disorder to contend with, but at least now I’m on medication. Heh.

I was suffering from a little trepidation. I’ve been asking myself what the hell I’m doing here in Cambria, but now I think it’s for the best. It’s a nice isolated place where no one can bother me (because my cell phone has absolutely no reception) And I can stare at the sea until I’m cross-eyed. There were perhaps other ways to achieve this sense of solitude, but I’m satisfied. Thanks, R.

So I finished reading through most of the e-mail I sent to N when we broke up. It’s kind of funny to be reading just half the conversation and yet still getting the full emotional impact without knowing what the response was.

It’s also kind of weird to be reading your own writing from a truly detached perspective. I am certainly not the same person who wrote those sad, heart-wrenching, gut-churning missives. I may still be currently clinically depressed, but I’ve also got a decades worth of baggage on top of it all.

I am clearly going to be alone for the rest of my life. Ah well.

What is sad and pathetic is that in my chronological writing—from e-mails to the handwritten notes I kept to my blog in its multiple incarnations, I just keep coming back to the topic of how hopelessly alone I feel, how wretched this singular existence is, and how helpless I feel about being able to do anything about it.

What I have recently accepted is that I just don’t want to deal with it. In some ways, it’s a manifestation of executive dysfunction syndrome. I know precisely what I have to do, and yet I’m not doing it. It’s not just this, not just meeting people. It’s a lot of things. I realize that the way I have learned to cope with stress is to freeze up when there’s too much pressure on me. To just fall apart.

It’s amazing that I’ve gone through all of these disasters, many at least partially caused by my own hand, still to have made some plodding progress in life. Looking back, I sort of wonder how I managed to escape psychotherapy. You’d think that someone as depressed or at least as dysthymic as I am would’ve been noticed. It’s easy to wallow in self-pity and say that it’s just that no one cares, but maybe if I hadn’t been so highly functioning, they would’ve picked me up.

Sometimes I wonder if being put under general anesthesia as a little kid didn’t nuke parts of my brain.

Whatever. It’s the hand I’m dealt, I guess.