This fishing expedition through my journals for, well, I don’t know exactly, but I guess, insight, fetches more queries than results. The entries address myriad topics but repeatedly the theme is about the failed quest for love.
It is as if this younger me believed that the purpose in life or at least a primary state to be reached was finding one’s true love. Each rise and fall of emotion is linked to a crushed crush or a failed romance. Other life events are reported, but are frequently intertwined with the retelling of some failed relationship. Dropping out of graduate school appears as a handful of sentences buried within the story of my relationship with Jeff. My year of counseling and attending AA meetings can be teased out if you read closely the passages about my relationship with Marcus and my fancy for a male friend from AA, Kenny.
One might categorize the eras of Robin’s entanglements broadly as:
- High school: Failure to be noticed by the opposite sex; questioning of my physical qualities
- Early college: Initial flirtation with males but all largely unrequited love
- Remaining undergraduate: Surviving a staggering number of crushes on men that eventually came out and then initial explorations of my own sexuality
- Graduation, graduate school, post-school Indiana University: Ravenous hunger to be viewed sexually followed by initial heterosexual relationships for 6 weeks to 6 months in length.
- SF Peninsula and initial time in SF, CA: Flirtation with danger: online dating, lesbian and work flings.
- Later time in SF, CA: Slowing down, three significant relationships: James, Cabbot, and Sandy.
- I am quite certain there are themes in there, especially with my original set of loves being unrequited for sexuality reasons: physical safety and emotional vulnerability dominating the initial years followed by increasingly risky behavior physically but with fortified walls around my emotional self. The last three relationships were intertwined in many ways, and the romance to friendship spectrum was rather fluid. All three have met each other over at least one meal.
I have yet to really delve into the entries that address these latter three as I am still in the midst of the Peninsula and early SF time, but I anticipate more of the same – complete focus on the need for a relationship and less focus on the need for a defined self, as if the making of myself was inconsequential compared to the finding of a person with whom to share my life.
I will include more passages below.
These petite dreams nibble at my sanity. The gargantuan fantasies are easy to fend off, but the little visions of smiles in your future and love wrapped around in you in a pair of arms – these are the creepy demons that chew on you. They catch you unexpectedly in a stranger’s smile or a mother’s laughter or someone else’s child dancing in the aisle of a grocery. They eat at me, and I sit there letting them.
7-14-96It’s funny how I can keep work together. I can work a sixty hour week and be all smiles and efficiency. But at home I cannot even bring myself to prepare food or pay the bills. I just eat out of bags, watch TV, cry and read. I cannot get up and out voluntarily. I feel fat, and pimply, and ugly and don’t want to be seen in public. It’s only now that I wish I had a car – so that I could get away without having to face people. Public transport is so….well… public. … I think about calling a suicide hotline but what would I say? I am, as always, swimming with my nose just millimeters above the murky, entangled water. … It seems everyone else flies through patches and clouds of sadness and for me I am grounded, and it is an ever denser fog. I can feel the sun rise and set and can pretend all is well – but then the fog never burns off and the pretense grows tiresome…. I wonder if it ever ends. Who would ever love someone as crazy and sad as me? It keeps circling – this depression – this sadness – circling over me. It is a vulture, a scavenger, waiting patiently.
7-19-96I cannot describe it. I just feel as if I’m seeping out on all sides. I feel alone and ugly and lost and hopeless and fat and stupid. I feel like an old fish net – all of the parts of me are squirming to get out and the restraints are getting weaker. So scared.
7-23-96No one can make the sorrow go away. No man. No friend. No doctor. No one. Just me learning to dance with my thoughts and learning how to avoid getting my toes stepped upon.
8-3-96While reading Prozac Nation, I’m thinking, yes, yes, yes, that is how it feels. It is suffocating. The neuroses are exponential – the tactophobia, the agoraphobia, the loneliness and paranoia, it’s all true, but why her? I am repulsed by her inability to pretend for work and her parents and her friends that it’s all ok. Because she gave up responsibilty and still managed to cling on to life…and I think that that means it wasn’t as bad for her. Because for me, there is nothing but responsibility pushing me forward. Responsibility to my parents, and friends, and work and banks and my fucking orthodontist and my cats and my plant – these tasks and obligations keep the sanity walls around the licking flames of my depression. Because if there were no parents to disappoint, no work that finds me exploitable and irreplaceable, no friends who need to call and cry on my shoulder, no cats to feed, no bills to pay – then I would be empty of excuses. It would be freedom, yes, but freedom to die – to die peaceably without disappointing anyone.
8-3-96I am so lost. Why is it suddenly when I’m broken, I don’t know who to turn to? Is there no one? I don’t think I can do this alone. I sat in the tub for almost an hour entertaining suicide. I can’t wrestle with this. It’s too big. It’s too much. It is an avalanche – so loud, so insistent, so cold. It covers me. There is nothing good now. I see only pointlessness, hopelessness, sadness. … I am an emotional leper. Parts of me fall all around. And I watch without control. That was my soul. I can’t blame anyone anymore. It is me. I’m wrong. There is so much wrong. I keep trying and failing. I can’t commit suicide just because that would be the final disappointment. … I want to stop. I want it all to stop. Tired of fighting phantoms and monsters no one else can see. … Can’t reach out. To whom would I talk? No one can do anything. I do as always. I cry in a closet; I weep in the tub.
12-20-96