It's really hard, sitting here, right now, this night. It was a bright day, cloudless and mild, and now there is a chill in the air. The harbinger of fall, maybe even winter.
Staring at this screen, I am waiting for words to come. The right ones. I know too many of the wrong ones, I have let them spill time and again, the wrong ones. They have embarrassed me, but I didn't learn. I also know too many of the silences, of waiting so long for the right words that none come at all, and I am useless.
The right ones came a little while ago, in a quiet but intense moment. Harsh, dark, vulnerable. My eyes welling with calm despair.
I don't know how to believe that things are going to get better.
It's a terrifying realization, for someone like me. It's not that I just don't think things will get better. It's that I can't remember how to think they will. I can't even fake it anymore.
Perhaps this doesn't make sense to you. I'm the happy one, I'm the optimistic one. I am the one you can count on to be chipper, to show you the bright side, to tell you it's going to be okay. There is no tragedy in my life, no risk, no uncertainty.
For a long time that was all true, and whatever I felt was wrong, I did think it was going to be okay. I really did. I believed it like I believe the sun will rise tomorrow.
I know that to some of you, there is nothing wrong with my life. I have a roof over my head, a nice one, a safe one in a quiet, woodsy, suburban neighborhood, and if there's a month I can't pay for the roof, my parents would. I have a job, for the moment, and when this job is over, I will have another one, and although they are temporary, they are mindless and they pay me well enough. I don't have to worry about anyone else. I don't have to worry about taking care of any aging parents or raising any young children. I don't have to worry whether my house will be swept into the ocean by a force of nature, and I don't have to worry whether someone I love is going to come home from a desolate land halfway around the world. Hell, I don't have to worry whether someone I love is going to come home from the store.
I mean, really. I met Bill Clinton and Howard Dean this year. What exactly do I have to complain about, anyway?
But you know what? It doesn't work that way. For everyone out there with the inclination to blow me off because my problems don't measure up, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.
I'm sad. But that word is too small, too weak. What I feel is overwhelming. I have been fighting against a sadness that is so dark, I can't remember where the light ever was. It is so deafening in its silence, it drowns out everything else, everything else. And I am very quickly running out of energy. All the pretending, all the acting. All the fighting.
And I don't know how to believe I will get through it.
I'm sorry if I don't have a good enough reason for you. These are the only ones I have.
I wish I was a better writer. Because it is impossible to talk about loneliness without sounding pathetic. Unless you are a better writer. Unless you know the right words.
I don't know the right words. I don't know how to explain what it is like to sit on the train on your way home from your last day at a job and think about what would happen if (metaphorically) you just kept riding. Calculate in your mind how long it would take for someone to notice you were gone. A day or two? Maybe a week? You've been known to hibernate, to ignore your phone and your e-mail. Maybe two weeks?
I don't know how to explain what it is like to see people you love, or people you just like, or even people you really don't care about, meet and go to the movies and have dinner and hold hands and sit on the couch and take naps and fall in love and go away for the weekend and walk in the park and get married and share the newspaper and buy a house and have babies, and to be happy for them even as you fight off the bitterness, while you continue to wonder at what point in your life you went wrong, what you said wrong, what you did wrong.
Because you are desperate, quietly, shamefully desperate, to understand why these outwardly simple things, these events in life that everyone seems to take for granted, have been denied you.
It's the last great unspoken secret, loneliness. You can confess your drug addiction, you can confess your eating disorder, you can confess your childhood abuse, you have lived through it and it took power and character and courage to overcome and you can be proud of having overcome it. But where is the pride in confessing that you are alone and unhappy about it? And what is the solution? There is no bootstraps way out of romantic loneliness. It is a problem that is inherently impossible to fix by yourself. Someone else has to do it. They have to look around at everyone else, and then choose you.
You have tried everything. You have been open and friendly and "yourself," whatever it means when people tell you to be that. You have lost weight (not enough) and ditched body issues (not really). You have smiled and made eye contact and smiled some more, smiled until your cheeks hurt. You have been (acted) bold and confident, innocent and shy, drunk and uninhibited. You have laughed at jokes and worn embarrassingly flattering sweaters and bumped knees accidentally on purpose under the table.
You have tried, how you have tried, everything that is supposed to work. Everything you've read, everything you've been told, everything you've seen work for everyone else.
But all that happened is that you've made an utter fool of yourself, more often than anyone realizes, over and over again. You have offered your heart to those who didn't really want it, at least you did in your head. (Hell, you've had entire relationships in your head, with men who may or may not have even known your last name.) And so it broke (your heart), in your head, somewhere along the way. Which is fine, you aren't the first person who's had a broken heart, but you did it yourself, and there is no sympathy for the brokenness of things when you've broken them yourself.
And if you are alone because no one has chosen you (that is, you are not choosing to be alone), then it's hard to argue that there is something wrong with all the men who have looked in your direction and chosen elsewhere. That they're the ones with the problem because they haven't noticed the wonder that is you.
(Only crazy people keep insisting it's everyone else who doesn't get it.)
And you see people who, for whatever reason (offered by your secret evil heart), you deem less worthy than you, and you see that they have still been granted this amazing gift, in the form of a person who has agreed to love them for a while. Maybe forever, maybe not, but they were loved yesterday and they are loved today. There are even people who know this more than once, who know this time and time again. But you do not know it, have not ever known it.
And so you stop wondering, and you start to accept, calmly and quietly and with only a little despair, that this is something that simply is not meant for you. That you are just one of those people who doesn't fit anyone else.
We all know people like that, don't we? We all know people who have been alone their whole lives. Your cousin, your next-door neighbor, your boss's secretary. What makes them different from you? Why wouldn't you be one of them?
Yet you hear people telling you that that is crazy, that of course there is someone out there for you, because you are so smart and sweet and kind, and you're funny and have such a good heart, and you are even pretty sometimes, and you smile and nod and say "Yes, of course you're right, there is indeed someone out there for me," except that in your heart, you have run out of hope.
Because you know. In your heart, your self-broken heart, you know it is not meant for you. You don't know why, you can only suspect that there is something wrong with some part of you, your mind, your voice, your hair your heart your touch your eyes your smile your soul, because surely, surely, you are 32 years old and you would have fit someone by now. Even for a little while. Surely.
And so you accept the aloneness, because you know you can exist alone, you have up until now and you can continue to do so, but the only thing you seem to be able to accept about the loneliness is that it will never go away, and you worry that you will never make your peace with it, and that you will have to spend a lifetime pretending that you have.
And you do not know how to believe that it will ever be different.
And then there is the career, the career you have paid $60,000 for except not really because you still owe people all of that, and because you've been dumb you actually owe a lot more.
The career that began seven years ago, when you first set foot inside a beautiful brick building with white pillars in front in a small, quiet town in central Pennsylvania, having said a million times over the summer "I'm starting law school in the fall" without ever getting tired of saying it. The excitement at being back in a classroom, of using your mind again, of learning, learning, learning, of redeeming yourself in the eyes of your friends and family who knew you only to be an academic underachiever, because now you can say "I'm in law school" and you can be proud. And you're going to work hard to prove everyone wrong, you are going to show them that you are smart and not lazy and you can finally "apply" yourself and you will be successful.
But of course, you don't. You work hard, but not hard enough, and you graduate, but without the best grades. And you move somewhere you think is home and you take the bar exam and you pass, incredibly, you pass, but you can't find a job and you take one that is something less than a lawyer because the firm is prestigious and you can always move up.
But you can't, and then you move to a city where there can never be enough lawyers except there are, and you spend two years looking and working on contract with people who went to schools like Michigan and GW and William and Mary and after two years you begin to accept that you probably aren't going to be a permanent lawyer here, and you might not be a lawyer ever, which would be fine except for all the money you owe for becoming one, and try as you might, wish as you might for the freedom to go live with your brother and work in a bookstore and write your novel, you owe people way too much money to ever be able to do that.
And even though you should be making enough money to live just fine, you don't. Your electricty gets shut off for almost three weeks because you didn't pay the bill for six months, but you get by while you save up the money to pay it by telling people at work that it's too hot to dry your hair, by skipping dinner, by going to a friend's house to watch the Democratic convention, and by faking the rest. You play roulette with the rest of the bills, always a couple of months behind, robbing the phone company to pay for the cable, and vice versa a month later. And there are still credit cards, and there are still student loans, and you pay them when you can, but not always.
And you do not know how to believe that it will ever be different.
And so you are stuck. You have to stay here and try to keep your head above water. You have to stay here, in this beautiful city of doom and high-risk targets and Code Orange.
In this city where you wait for the Metro at the Pentagon while men with M-16's roam the platform, and posters ask you if you have a transistor radio and a first-aid kit, and a public-service announcement begins "In order to avoid what happened in Madrid..."
In this city of ubiquitous ID badges and suspicious activity tip lines flashed on signs above you on the highway and cement barriers on the sidewalk to protect the high-risk targets, as though cement barriers will do the trick.
You have to stay in this city that doesn't want you, that you can't afford, that won't give you a permanent job, that can't guarantee your safety.
But it's fine. Because you look around the country, around the world, and you realize that you can't escape it, no matter where you go.
You look around the world and you wonder what the future of it is, because it is a world where your fellow human beings massacre thousands of adults who did nothing more than go to work, and it is a world where your fellow human beings massacre hundreds of children who did nothing more than go to school.
And you know that your parents did not live in this world when they were your age. And you are afraid to think about what kind of world you'll be living in when you are their age.
Because you do not know how to deal with the constant fear, the overwhelming hate. Maybe you find moments of escape, the few minutes of a song, an hour or so with a friend, but the truth is always there when you lay your head down at night, alone in your bed, the unrelenting sadness.
And you do not know how to believe that it will ever be different.
I no longer have any ground underneath me. No place I go feels right. My own skin doesn't feel right. I feel lost, or almost lost, just around the corner from lost, everywhere I am, everywhere I go. It is the strangest, most unsettling thing I have ever known, this constant state of tension.
It makes me remember a high school science class, a lesson on potential energy, the illustration a line drawing of a boulder perilously balanced on the edge of a cliff. That is what this feels like. All I can do is wait for the boulder to go over the cliff, but I don't know when it will happen, and I don't know how it will happen, and I don't know what it will look like when it's over.
In the darkest moments, I am in a room with no lights and no windows and I walk around and around and around and cannot for the life of me find the door.
I have been in this room before, a couple of times. But before, there was some part of me that always believed I would get out. I would flail around for a while, but I always knew, deep deep deep down, that I would, eventually, someday, find the door.
But not now. Now, I can't even contemplate the existence of a door. It is like theoretical physics, or 9/11, or God. It is beyond what I am capable of understanding.
And the thing is, when you no longer believe in the door, you start to wonder why you bother to walk around the room looking for it. And when you stop looking, you start to wonder why you bother to walk around the room at all.
Enough with the metaphors. What happens, what has happened, is a complete loss of the ability to experience any emotion, of feeling anything other than sadness, and sometimes, there's not even that. Sometimes -- a lot of times -- there is just nothing. And it is awful.
Friends share good news of new boyfriends and engagements and weddings and babies and promotions, and while I recognize their happiness, I do not feel it inside my own self, like I usually do. Election-related news that used to anger me on a daily basis no longer has an effect. I don't get excited about things I always used to get excited about, new television shows or Grand Slam tennis tournaments or family reunions. I want to feel the joy and the anticipation and even the anger, but I don't have the energy it requires.
I get up, I take a shower, I get dressed, I go to work, I come home, I go to bed. And when I do, there is a moment of exhalation that I have made it through one more day without my world caving in, without my mind caving in. Just one more day, I have made it, and I am relieved.
But inevitably, in the moment after the relief, there is the next thought, the thought my head settles on as I fight to sleep.
I don't know if I'm going to make it through tomorrow.
There is so much that is hard about this, but by far the hardest is what to do with my friends.
I don't know how to let them in. I know a lot of them care. I know a few of them love me as though I were family. But I just can't let them in.
Maybe it's because it is a role I'm not sure I know how to play. I am always happy to soak up everyone else's problems, I know how to sit on the phone with them or hug a bottle of wine with them and listen and absorb and try to help, but I do not know how to talk about me. I have been the one others lean on. That is who I am, that is where I find my worth. That's the role I know.
And maybe it's because there have been a few times, in the past, where I have tried to lean, and have been shoved back upright, or perhaps allowed to fall. No, no no, that's not how this is supposed to work, they say. I am not this person for you. You are supposed to be this person for me. So be quiet, and come back when you are you again, for the love of God.
(No one has ever actually said that.)
Some of you have been so kind, some of you who are my dearest friends, some of you who are strangers to me, some of you who have been reading me for years, some of you who I have met recently and adored, and I have not held up my end. I have missed your birthdays and your weddings and I couldn't be there during your own sad times and I have just not been the kind of friend you deserve. And I am ashamed of that.
To everyone who reached out and was met with silence, or who would have reached out if you had known where I was, I am sorry. I really am.
But I don't know how to turn all of this -- to turn myself -- over to you.
What I do know is that it's time for me to stop this. The journal.
I think it's probably past time. I've stopped reading other journals, almost entirely. I haven't updated my own in almost three months, and I have not missed it, though I have felt its burden.
This part is hard to explain. (As though the rest of this hasn't been.) It has something to do with where I am now, but not really, as I've been thinking about ending it for the better part of a year.
Part of it has to do with the fact that there are very few people in my everyday life who know about this journal. That used to amuse me. I liked the fact that I had this little secret, this small part of my life that I didn't have to share with anyone. (Hello, irony.)
But then the lines between my real life and my journal life started to blur, which I was happy about, but I had to lie about how I knew people, and that wasn't so fun anymore. I suppose I could have come clean, but, like just about any big lie, I kept thinking that I could maintain it with just one more little lie on top of it, and one more on top of that, and at some point it became too late to out myself. Instead, I lug around this mountain of lies, and I can't do it anymore.
I think partly because of that association, this world, the online journal world, has become increasingly unreal to me. That's the only way I can think to describe it, this strange and virtual world, where everyone exists, but not really, because when you turn off your computer, they all disappear. This is a world where most of the time, people are good and honest and kind, but sometimes they are not, and sometimes there is gossip and meanness and blatant duplicity, and sometimes I'm not up for it. The dramas that are played among us out feel artificial somehow, created out of whole cloth, the existence of the negative for its own sake.
Please don't get me wrong, I do not mean to diminish the value of online journals or online relationships, and I do not mean to insult anyone who feels at home online. There is no doubt that this community has provided a safe haven for many people, myself included. And there is no doubt that some of the relationships I have because of this journal mean more to me than I can ever express. They are people who have become a part of me, a part of the core of who I am. They are the people who are around even when my computer is off, and I am a better, deeper, more alive person for knowing them.
So the good has always outweighed the bad, which means that this is not easy, closing this particular book. Even now, as I sit here, I'm trying to find a reason not to quit. Six years of doing anything even remotely consistently is a pretty good record for me. And I'm not the best at letting go of things.
So I can't say this is it, the end, it's over. I just don't have it in me.
Let's call it an indefinite hiatus, and leave it at that.
