It's really hard, sitting here, right now, this night. It is raining. There's a chill in the air. The harbinger of fall. An ending.
Staring at this screen, 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. Someone I trusted, 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.
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 upscale neighborhood, and if there's a month I couldn'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 the fuck 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 fall in love and get married and have babies, to be happy for them even as you fight off the bitterness, while you continue to wonder at what point in your life things went wrong, what you said wrong, what you did wrong.
Because you are desperate, quietly, shamefully desperate, to understand why this has 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. Inherently, it is the only problem you can't fix by yourself. Someone else has to do it. They have to look around at everyone else, and then choose you.
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 and chosen elsewhere. That they're the ones with the problems because they haven't noticed the wonder that is you.
Only crazy people keep insisting it's everyone else who doesn't get it.
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, but you act as if). You have smiled and made eye contact and smiled some more, smiled until your cheeks hurt. 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 it's not like you can tell anyone. You did it yourself, and there is no sympathy for that.
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 are alone their whole lives. What makes you different from them? Why wouldn't you be one of them?
And 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 someone out there for me," when in your heart you have run out of hope.
It is not meant for you. You don't know why, but it isn't. There must be something wrong with your heart, your mind, your words, your hair your eyes your touch 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. 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" and never getting tired of 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, everyone who knew you to be that underachiever, you are going to show them that you are smart and not lazy and you can finally "apply" yourself and you will be successful.
And you worked hard, but not hard enough, because you still don't get the best grades, but you graduate. 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, skipping dinner, going to a friend's house to watch the Democratic convention, and 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 train 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 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 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 you live in a world where your fellow human beings massacre thousands of adults who did nothing more than go to work, you live in 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 out of place 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 how I feel all the time. All I can do is wait for the boulder to go over the cliff. And 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, believe it or not. But back then, there was some part of me that always believed I would find the way 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, not this time. I can't even contemplate the existence of a door. It is like theoretical physics, or 9/11, or God. Beyond what I am capable of understanding.
And what happens 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.
Throwing aside 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 not even that. Sometimes, it is just nothing.
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 want to, I want to feel these things again, but I don't have the energy it requires. I try everything to feel something, and nothing works.
I get up, I take a shower, I get dressed, I go to work, I come home.
When people visit and want to be a tourist for a little while, I like to show them the Jefferson Memorial at night. I think all of the monuments are so much more beautiful at night, the bright lights shining on the white marble. They're all open until midnight and very well guarded, so you are safe, as safe as you can be here. And even though it's not really quieter because there is always traffic and there are always tourists, there is a stillness in the surrounding darkness that isn't there during the day. I like the Jefferson in particular, mostly because it looks out over the Tidal Basin, and the water adds an element of peace as well.
I took a friend there a few weeks ago, and I've found myself going back quite often since. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but I keep going back, one or two nights a week, sometimes right up until midnight. I always pause in the rotunda and look at Jefferson's statue, I always read the words engraved in the panels and around the rim of the dome, and then I sit on one of the wide cold stone steps and wrap my arms around my knees and watch the other visitors or stare at the water or wipe away tears or all three, for a few minutes, for an hour.
Then I come home, and 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 it's the next moment, the moment after the relief. It's the thought I carry with me to sleep every night.
I don't know if I'm going to make it through tomorrow.
There is so much that is hard about this, but 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'm not capable of letting them in. 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. When I don't have the right words for someone, it devastates me. 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 myself over to you.
(I still don't. Even though you know all of this now, I still don't.)
It's time for me to stop this. The journal.
I think it's probably past time.
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.
I think partly because of that, 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 people are good and honest and kind, but sometimes they are not, and sometimes the gossip and meanness and blatant duplicity are a little too much for me to take. 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 relationships, or insult anyone who feels at home online. There is no doubt that this virtual world 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 have become a part of me, a part of the core of who I am. I am a better, deeper, more alive person for knowing them. They are real.
The rest of it isn't. Through no one's fault but my own, the rest of it isn't.
Not that it isn't hard, 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.
Like now. I'm incapable of saying this is it, this is the end, this is over.
So we'll call it an indefinite hiatus, and leave it at that.
