So recently i’ve been feeling really self-critical and extremely anti-me. About a week ago i realized a local bar was having their monthly goth night and i got a little pep out of the idea. On a local Discord server, this really cool chick said she was gonna go, and my wife and i were also planning on going (until she felt under the weather and stayed home), and all of us were broke, so i figured i’ll get a few big beers at the supermarket, and we’ll meet up in the parking lot and just pregame before going in.
It ended up being a whole lot of fun (for me, anyway). She brought (IIRC, the night is a bit fuzzier now) her roommate and her (roommate’s) partner, and they were hella cool and nice and fun, and i even danced while terrifically drunk without falling over, despite wearing heeled platform boots. Great, right?!
But the next day happened.
Here’s how bipolar works: some days are dreary, and then at some point you realize that you’re fun to be around, you’re pretty smart and funny, and you’re still fairly attractive despite your advanced age (that huge beer gut really isn’t that noticeable if you wear the right top), and you’re a fairly likeable person, so you treat yourself to some fun, and — after many years of avoiding people (oh i also have Avoidant Personality Disorder) — you might even awkwardly try to make some new friends in the process of being pretty fun to be around. And then the mania ends, and you realize that no, actually, you’re not at all fun or smart or attractive or witty, you’re actually fairly well the opposite of those things. That really nice self-perception gives way to the terrible reality that you’re actually just a fake-ass try-hard poseur dipshit loser. Toss in some alcohol, and you might not even remember what you probably did, but you’re sure as hell that you’d be absolutely mortified if you could.
So i thought i’d try to be friendly and make friends — oh geez you just have no idea how unbelievably cool this gal is, she’s just the bee’s leg joints, i ain’t kidding, i’d die to actually be IRL friends with her, she’s so sweet and funny and cute and smart and brave, and so helpful; she’s just a lovely human being — and then you spend way too much money and things kinda crash, and now you’re so broke you’re not sure how you’re going to eat or get around for the next couple of weeks (work’s been drying up as well), and the next day you strongly suspect your imagined “charm” was all a bipolar mirage, and really you were just a twitchy, insufferable dork, and… you get The Message. The Universe says, “oh hahaha no no no no no. No. You can’t do that. What a stupid idea; don’t you ever think you could do that again, you stupid twerp. You deserve no such happiness.”
I’ve quit the local Discord servers. This seems to be a thing i keep doing. I’m embarrassed to show up anywhere people might associate my handle with atrocious behavior or excessive stupidity. Also i’m deleting messages i posted, even DMs. I’ve said goodbye to Instagram, which i really only wanted to keep a presence on for promoting my awful music anyway. Shaving, grooming, and makeup have become quaint things of the past. Already my old beard is filling in. It’s so easy to give up. I’ve tried so hard for so long. It’s almost as exhausting to be me, always losing, as it must be to witness me being me. I feel so awful for other people.
some random notes as i narcissistically learn more about myself:
- i’m bi – so i’m not queer enough to be LGBTQIA+ (other bi people are, though)
- i’m non-binary – so i’m not trans enough to be transgender (other enbies are, though)
- i’m too old now to ever be able to be beautiful (other people my age — like my wife! — are actually genuinely gorgeous, though)
- i’ve never been as smart as some people seemed to think
- i’m not very funny except on very rare occasions
- every good or cool thing i’ve ever done? it was just the mania, it wasn’t even me at all
So anyway, i’d already been thinking of ending it on or right before my birthday next week. And then something made me think of the days… see, one of my other friends measures her time in thousands of days, so i looked it up on my phone, where i have a widget counting the days since that awful first one… and 20 thousand days alive are coming up in about nine and a half months. Now i’m thinking (since i’m a fucking pussy coward anyway) i should just wait for that. Maybe that’ll give me time to get my name change in order, too. It’d be nice if nobody ever found out what happened to that old guy (as if anyone would ever care). At any rate, maybe something will happen to shake me out of the complete and absolute certitude of my feelings about my own awfulness and worthlessness. Who knows.
Oh hey i just realized this is a great place to plug my new song, which is incidentally about all of this:
I just started therapy today too, so i got into the weeds a bit about how my parents abandoned me, and boo hoo this and that, and about biker dudes killing my favorite kitten, and how i wrecked my grandparents’ marriage, and the whole horror of early childhood thing. So we’ll see how it goes.
But i guess if something different happens, maybe someday someone can stumble on this post and realize that it was gonna happen, and maybe understand a little bit more about why it happened.
