Life Heroin

I hadn’t gotten high in months.
Because the last few times I did, I got existentially sad.  Go figure.

But I decided to get high again last night.  No one else was home, it was just me, a joint and my honest thoughts.
Boy did I get honest with myself.

I recorded myself and the resultant emotional breakdown/breakthrough.

I’ve decided I’ll publish some transcripts from those recordings.  Below is the first one.

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I am so shit scared that I have imprinted you on my life so much…you…That’s what it is.
You have left such an imprint on me because you were the man I loved when I was living the most reckless, self-indulgent, selfish, exhilarating, caution to the wind, living on the edge of life, leaning into the universe, two years (I think that makes sense, grammatically).  You were the man I loved when I was living that kind of life, which made me fall in love with life.

YOU WERE THE MAN I LOVED WHEN I FELL IN LOVE WITH LIFE.

Holy fuck.  Is that not a poem or something?

…

I, the, I can’t even think of of our relationship without thinking of the life I led that was just mine, it’s not, you didn’t do those things in my life that i fell in love with.  I just loved you at the same time.   You didn’t cause these things, I caused these things.  I was the one pushing my life to the furthest it had ever been before.  I had started over.  I just picked up my life and moved it half-way across the world.  I was in it, that was mine.  I sat in it.  I sat in it and moved around in it and I engraved myself onto my own life.  

I’m so sad.  And I’m so scared.
That I fell in love with my own life and I can’t, I can’t recreate it.
And I’ll spend my whole life chasing this.

I feel like I did life heroin.  I feel like I did life heroin.  Oh my God.

…

I’m in so much pain

…

I feel like I’m imploding.

…

Oh, Jesus.  I think I’m addicted to the destruction.
I think I am doing life heroin.  Well someone who’s doing life heroin would feel like they were doing life heroin and that’s the fucking paradox.  I don’t think paradox is the right word…

I just keep doing this to myself and I think I’m addicted to it.
Oh, God, I hate myself.

…

Now I’ve gone an upset the dog

…

Sardonic.

 

xx K

I cried for the first time since blocking N on social media.
I was watching ‘To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’ on Netflix and just started crying.  It wasn’t a long cry.  I don’t allow myself to cry for long periods of time anymore, if at all..  It seems like a waste of energy.  Maybe I’m just dead inside.
But I realised, through my tears, that I was angry.

Fuck you for making me think that I imagined you loving me, for doubting that you ever loved me.  You may not have loved me in the best way but you did, love me.

When we sat on that rooftop in Istanbul, watching the sun set, and you leaned in to whisper in my ear, “I hate you.”
When you got really ill and asked me to come over to take care of you.
When you called me baby when we made love.
When you wrapped your arms around me as I cooked dinner.
When you mock-karate chopped me, interspersed with kisses.
When you introduced me to your brother and dad.
When you took me to your childhood home and slept in your childhood bed.
When you strapped my walking sticks to my backpack before I hiked up Snowdon.
When you told me that it should have been just the two of us from the start.
When you cried at the airport after we said our goodbyes.
When you searched for me in your bed when I went to the bathroom.
When we shared toothbrushes.
When we shared a shower.
When you watched Interstellar about 6 times because I kept on falling asleep.
When you held me like a baby when I started crying after watching Game of Thrones because I realised how much I was going to miss you and didn’t want to leave you and how fucking scared I was about going home and breaking my heart.

I remember these things.  I remember the ways in which you loved me.
But I also remember the ways in which you hurt me.

Both memories make me sad, mad, and afrad.

 

xx K

How did I screw up so badly?

I stood here, the light of the street lamp bouncing off your dusty-white Holden turned Toyota your dad had helped patch together.  We debated how best to fit your bike in the backseat.  You may need to roll the rear window down.

The night was young or was it?  I can’t seem to recall now.  3 years is a long time.

I tried to help the best I could but as usual, you managed to do most of the heavy lifting.  You were always good at that.
The door clicked shut, just.  As you turned around to face me I hugged my jacket closer.  Maybe because of the wind.  Maybe because I needed the protection.

You told me you didn’t want me to go to London but you and I both knew it didn’t matter.  You were the reason I was leaving.  I needed to do this, for me.
The unspoken understanding enveloped us.  I think we hugged.  You were good at that too.

I stood right here and said goodbye to the first and maybe the only man who loved me.

 

K

No one makes me bleed my own blood.

My little sister got engaged yesterday and as I was tasked with cooking our big family Sunday night dinner, I decided to cook up a big vegetarian meal for her and her new fiance.  I decided to make potato au gratin and for some reason decided to dig out the mandolin that I hadn’t used in years to cut the potatoes.  I was literally two minutes in to prep, and I sliced a chunk of my thumb off.  I felt the razor sharp metal bite into my flesh.  I immediately pressed under the wound to stop the inevitable pooling of blood.  I watched the cross section of the cut, white flesh with pinkish specks.  It hadn’t started bleeding yet because I was cutting off the supply of blood with my other hand.  I stared at this open wound, wondering in vain if there was a way I could avoid the bloodshed.  I knew there wasn’t.  As my mother helped bandage me up, I released my hold on the cut.  Blood rushed in and, as expected, pooled within the bandage.  I dabbed at the blood, soaking tissue paper in my shockingly red claret but knew I would have to leave it alone if I wanted it to congeal and scab over.  I held my arm in the air, continued prepping dinner, and waited.

 

Today was also the day I cut N out of my life.

And it’s going roughly the same way.

 

We had been messaging.  It started when he was travelling.  He was in Japan at the time and I DM’ed him and it went from there.  We continued to talk throughout the remainder of this travels.  I held onto some faint hope that he was going to end up in Sydney and it would be a reunion of sorts.  Part of me knew he wouldn’t come.  What could be achieved by visiting me?  Circumstances hadn’t changed.  I knew it’s looking more likely that I’ll be going back to London there is no guarantee and no concrete date.

And I was right, he didn’t come to Sydney.  The next thing I knew I was watching his Instagram story of his first day back in London.  I was disappointed but knew that it was illogical sadness.  I also figured our exchange of messages was also to end now that our time zones were back to being almost diametrically opposite but we ended up having one more round of conversation last weekend.

Throughout our conversations over the past few weeks we had referenced how things used to be, how we missed certain things, how nice things were back then…I’m not going to lie.  I was getting invested.  I liked knowing that he dreamt about me, as I did him.  I liked hearing him reminisce about our relationship’s heyday.  I gave me hope that not all was lost – that this inexplicable anchorage I felt with him was mutual.  Kindred spirits.  Twin flames.
Then yesterday I watched his Instagram story.  He’s in Amsterdam this weekend.
There’s only one person he knows in Amsterdam: this women who had deep-liked one my Instagram posts months earlier.  I watched her public Instagram story.  He was there with her.  He had gone to see her and undoubtedly sleep with her again.

I felt jealously burn in my belly.  As much as I reasoned with myself that he had every right to see and sleep with this woman because we weren’t together, the anger and sadness overwhelmed reason.
He had been messaging me only last weekend.  He made it all the way to South East Asia, and didn’t visit me but he flies to Amsterdam to visit this chick, with enthusiasm?  What a stunning rejection.  What a slap in the fucking ego.  I know we’re not together but that’s fucking cold.

 

So I did what any spiralling woman does – called my best friend.

And boy did she spell it out for me.

He doesn’t respect you.

 

It slapped me harder than his callousness had.
Because it was true.  It was something I had always feared and had tried to explain away with his mental health struggles but I couldn’t run away from it anymore.  He doesn’t respect me.  Maybe that’s what he meant when he said he didn’t think he could love me.  To love someone you need to respect them.  It’s a Captain Obvious situation and I feel pitiful for saying it like it’s something I’m just realising.
All throughout our relationship I feared that he was ashamed of me.  He didn’t care for me like I was a treasure to him.  He didn’t hesitate to hurt me.  He questioned our compatibility: even questioned my authenticity.  Our relationship was a public secret for 90% of the time we were together.  He never boasted about me.  I don’t think I can recall him ever praising me.  The only thing he enjoyed about me was the sex.

 

I can’t allow myself to be valued in such a base and one-dimensional way.  I mean I could, in the same way as I could totally do heroin, but I really shouldn’t.  If he doesn’t respect me, at least I can.

So he’s been blocked/unfriended/otherwise excised from my life.

It hurts.

Like the cut to my thumb, I had been applying pressure to the wound all this time.  Don’t let it bleed.  If it doesn’t bleed it’s almost as if the cut’s not there.
But it needs to bleed.  It needs to bleed so that it can coagulate and a scab can form.  Then that scab needs to flake away to reveal tender, pink flesh and a newly healed thumb.
I’m bleeding right now.  A delayed and overdue letting to purge the toxins that had accumulated and allow for the painful process of healing.

 

I thought he was worth it.  I thought he was worth fighting and waiting for but maybe he’s not.  Maybe I was overly optimistic.  Sometimes people don’t develop into the people you hoped they would.  Maybe the person you thought they were was a mirage, a projection of your own messed up shit.  Maybe he really never loved me.

 

I’m still bleeding.

 

K

Blame the gin.

I never thought I was the type of person who put a lot of stock in their career.  I learned, from my last depressive episode, that it was okay that I didn’t derive a sense of identity from what I did for a living.  It was okay that my job was a means to an end to pursue happiness from other facets of my life.
I think that’s changed somewhat.  Whilst it’s still not a primary informant of my sense of self, my work has been a major driving force of personal growth for me over the past 6 months.  I’m still learning in love but I think I’ve reached that point where the lessons I’m learning from forging a career are the lessons that are having more impact on my life.  Stress management, communication, networking, time management, etc.  These are adult soft skills and although I’ve been managing to avoid any real development of these skills thus far in my life it’s probably beneficial for me to have them as I near my 30s.

Oh that reminds me; I turned 29 two days ago.

N wished me a happy birthday.

I’ve spent the last 2 days being a bit pathetic and lamentable.  I’m blaming the gin.

I just want to be together.  Is that so bad?  I just want there to be no distance between us.  I just want him to get to a point where he can love without masochism.
I want him to burn with the unease of realisation; the realisation that I left an imprint on his soul – a level of contentedness he fears he can achieve will no one else.  I want him to ache with daily dullness at the thought that I might not feel the same way.
I want the bright sunshine to sting like icy shards because it doesn’t feel right for there to be light and laughter for a soul so dark with melancholy.

I am weak.  I am not strong.  I am trying but a large part of me doesn’t want to succeed.  Because what will my life be if I don’t have the safety net of this hypothetical love?  Aimless.  Work-filled.  Some zombie person.  Sydney turns me into this Zombie person.  Work, partner, kids, property.  Rinse and repeat.  I would rather kill myself.  Sydney is a parasite.

I feel like I’m in the matrix, forced to live in this dream-state of sunshine and good pay whilst the life is being drained from me.

Maybe I need to reconsider therapy.

 

K

I’m sorry for not choosing you.
But you didn’t give me a reason to.

Our entire relationship, even at the very end, you have figuratively and literally pushed me away.  There’s only so much rejection I can swallow with pride.  There’s only so many times I can tell myself that you really do love me but you hold me at arm’s length because you’re scared before I’m just that naive idiot-woman who people call delusional behind their back.

I doomed our relationship when I chose to come back here.  I realise that.  As much as I had dreamed that a year-long long distance relationship could have worked out, it really wouldn’t have.  I know myself enough to know that it wouldn’t have.  I can admit that now.  You made the right decision.  But even if you turned around tomorrow and wanted to get back together, I don’t have faith in it, in us, in you.
I can’t trust you not to do the same shit you’ve done in the past.  To love me and deny me in the same breath.  I tried.  I did my best – I did a lot but you need to be the one to heal you, otherwise you’ll never trust yourself.

And you don’t.  You didn’t trust that you could give me what I wanted or what I needed.  You said that when you broke up with me.  You don’t trust that you can love any one because you think you don’t know how.  And maybe you don’t know.  All I know is that as long as you think you can’t, you won’t.
“Don’t love me.  I’m wrong.  Don’t love me.  I’m a bad person.  Don’t love me.  I don’t know what to do with it.”

I didn’t choose you because you told me not to.
I don’t regret not choosing you because no matter what happens in the future, we both needed this.  If there was ever a chance for us, me and you, this was necessary.

 

K

Sitting in the sadness

‘Twas the night before the night before Christmas.
That is to say, it was the 23rd of December.

Work has wound down and I whilst I am grateful for the break, I kinda dread the new year, and the onslaught of complicated, and new work hurdles I’ll face.
It’s all part of the process and it needs to be done so I should just shut up and get on with it, shouldn’t I?  Probably.

 

I almost slept with someone the other night.  Well, at least I had the opportunity to sleep with someone.  The guy from the NY office whom I went to drinks with a few weeks back.  Honestly I went back and forth, mentally weighing up the pros and cons throughout the night.  He’s too young.  I would like the release though.  Am I really that attracted to him?  Enough.  Will everyone from the office find out?  Probably.  I miss the rush; the intentionally wayward touch, the banter laced with innuendo, the promise of urgent and hungry kisses and skin to skin contact.  Bodies in the dark.
I don’t know what stopped me.  Maybe he got too drunk.  Maybe he was too American.  Maybe I knew it would be stupid to do anything with a co-worker (even one who lived on the other side of the world).  Maybe he just wasn’t whom I wanted to share my body with.  He wasn’t whom I imagined towering over me, arms framing my head, body between my legs.  Not the back I wanted to run my hands over, not the arms I wanted to grip, not the ears I wanted to hear my breath hitch.  He wasn’t the one I wanted to make love to.

And it’s still that which I crave.  Making love.  Not fucking.  Not raw, animal sex.
Don’t get me wrong.  I have needs and I’m feeling the urgency of those needs.  I just have emotional needs that are still dictating the expression of my urges, at least for now.

And that’s what I need to do.  That’s about all I can bloody do so I’d best be getting around to actually doing it.  I need to be okay with feeling this – let my feelings play out.  I need to sit in the sadness.

Twas the night before Christmas.

 

K.

Am I the asshole?

I’m exhausted.

I am mentally and emotionally drained.

The past week at work has been a battle, both in terms of my capacity to get through all that has been asked of me, and the literal battle between me/my team and another department.  The week has seemingly gone on for an age and even though I’ve reached the weekend I am still checking into work to keep an eye on a campaign.

 

I miss him.  There’s a dullness inside me.  That’s what I was trying to articulate in my last post.  I feel like a shell of a person.  I function.  I go to work.  I eat.  I can even laugh but it’s that empty, tinny laugh; echos bouncing off thin aluminium walls.  I am the tin man – where is my heart?  I remember where I left it.  It’s in my tiny bedroom back in London, where everything within it spelled my independence.  It’s in the bone-chilling wind and warmth found indoors.  It’s in N’s sleeping tangle of limbs.  It’s in the pints, pubs, banter and friendships I left behind.  I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this.  How do you live without your heart?

…

I went out to after-work drinks with a guy who’s visiting from the NY office.  Nothing romantic at all.  We got to talking about relationships.  He told me about his first-love and a couple of his recent flings.  I told him about N.  Once I mentioned that N was still in London and that we had tried to do long distance, his obvious comprehension of the reasonable-ness of the break-up irked me somewhat.  Why was it that all the guys I had told the story to, always been so matter of fact about just how reasonable it was for N to break things off?
“What did you want him to do?”
“I wanted him to fight for me.  I wanted him to think I was worth it.”
“But you didn’t think he was worth it.  You left.”
“Yeah I chose my love for myself over my love for him.”
“Then it wasn’t true love.  If it’s true love you’re supposed to choose them.”
“You’re telling me you would choose being with a woman even if it meant you were broke?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never experienced that kind of love before.”

Was I the asshole?  Was I supposed to choose him?  I could have stayed.  Sponsorship was on the table.  I would have been broke and my long term career prospects would not be as promising but I could have chosen him, chosen London.  I think to some degree I was/am the asshole.  That’s not to say it wasn’t the right thing to do.  I still think coming back to Sydney was the right move, no matter how much I am hurting right now and how much I will hurt over the next year or so.  I needed to be an asshole.  Guys have no problem being the asshole.  They choose themselves, almost every time.  Save yourself – serve yourself.  And at the end of the day, he told me he didn’t love me.  That was a big asshole thing to say.  So I guess we were both assholes.

I miss that asshole.  When am I going to stop missing him?  Will I ever stop?

 

K

Stupid in love

I knew from the start that not too many people approved of my relationship with N.

One of my closest male friends, who is also very good friends with N, told me to steer clear of him.
My girlfriends told me that I could do better and that he was an asshole.

I chose not to heed their warnings because, I told myself at the time, I wasn’t in this for love.  N was initially a way to get physical satisfaction without getting burdened with a relationship.

But it turned into something so much more.

I cannot fathom getting into a relationship now, no matter how confined to the physical realm, with anyone.  I just don’t want anyone.  I miss him.  That’s part of it but I’m also super wary of getting romantically involved with someone because I want to go back to London and I just do not want the complication of a man to get in the way of that.  Men are selfish and I know that when I love, I compromise, and I do not want to get myself into a situation where I have to decide whether I want to pursue a future with a man or pursue my happiness and move back to London.  Because no man would choose me over their happiness.  Given a choice between what they want for themselves and what they want for their relationship, they will always chose themselves.  Women have to know this.  This shit isn’t taught in school but it bloody well should.  Do not ever think love will cause a man to compromise his own dreams or desires.  Love may very well coincide with their dreams and desires but this is the only circumstance in which a man will pursue love AND YOU CANNOT DO ANYTHING TO MAKE THAT COINCIDENCE HAPPEN.  That is what I want you to take away from this.  No matter how well you love them, if they aren’t ready to make love their priority, YOU WILL NEVER CONVINCE THEM TO.  The really sadistic thing is, I think it takes at least one woman who tries to convince them to take love seriously to make them think they thought of it all by themselves and make the commitment.  Call me jaded.  Call me bitter.  Men are giant babies.  Selfish until the point when they realise mummy won’t continuously provide everything without needing something in return – appreciation and reciprocation.

 

Fuck you.

If flying means falling, I prefer the ground

I shouldn’t still love him.

How can I still love someone who’s told me that they don’t love me, twice?  Even if I know it’s a lie.  Is it a lie?  Am I being naive?  Am I trying to convince myself that he is lying to rationalise our relationship?  I just don’t see how he could be with me, act the way he did with me, care for me and not love me.  He’s not a psychopath.

I dream about him.  I hope he dreams about me too.  I hope he’s hurting.  Not because I want him to suffer (okay I might want him to suffer a little bit) but because if he’s hurting it means it meant something to him too.  If I’m being completely honest, I want him to hurt because it might be that he realises just how much he does love me and how much better I made his life.  Doesn’t everyone feel like that when they get broken up with?  My sister doesn’t.  If someone breaks up with her, her attitude is ‘Okay.  That’s that.  You’ve made your choice and you’re now dead to me.’.  It really is that black and white to her.  I see all the grey.  All the bloody grey and that’s why I struggle to talk to her about these things.  She does her best.  She’s so much better than she was.  Sometimes I wish I could be as decisive as she is.  She is incredible.  She always knows exactly what she wants and she goes out and gets it.  That’s it.  She has her faults – like everyone – but I want to steal her steeliness sometimes.  This breakup is about as steely as I have been in my life.  I’ve cried a handful of times, and I miss him a lot but I’m not letting this devastate me.  I’m in control enough to keep pursuing my life because his love never defined me.

I still have my life and my happiness and an obligation to myself to pursue that.

But I still think of him all the time.  I still want him to be with me.  I want him to want to be with me.  I still want him to choose me.  That’s what I want.  I want him to make a conscious decision to pick me.  To be with me because he loves me; because I make him feel safe, to want better for himself, loved.  To be with me because I keep him grounded.  I’m not sure he wants to be grounded though.  Which love is better?  Love that keeps you grounded or love that makes you fly?  Perhaps the perfect love does both but if I had to choose one, I’d pick love that keeps you grounded.  I had the love that made you fly – it’s dangerous.  It’s wonderful, exhilarating, inspiring and fun but really fucking dangerous because you can fall to your death if it stops.  Maybe he wants the flying kind of love.  I feel like he’s hung up on his ex because she made him fly.  She’s an artist.  I think he thinks she’s the one that got away.  And who knows?  Maybe she is.  Maybe they’ll get back together and maybe they’ll fly away together and be happy.  Or maybe they’ll get back together and he’ll realise that that feeling can’t sustain you.  If someone feels like an escape, there’s a problem.  That person becomes a kind of drug.

But everyone needs to live these lessons themselves.  You can’t teach someone these things.

I guess that’s why I’m relatively okay.  Even if N does learn this lesson, and there’s a chance he won’t, that doesn’t change anything for me right now.  Even if he has an epiphany and jumps on a plane to profess his love and devotion, in the meantime I have a life to lead.  There’s no point wasting time.

That doesn’t mean I can’t still love him.

 

xx K