Meursault's Journal

[meursault]

Thanks radical.  It's pointless, though.  I texted a few friends that I'm not interested in knowing them any more, that I'm just going to spend my time getting drunk.  I emailed my therapist saying I'm not coming back.  I give up.  There is something so disgusting and hideous and unlovable and all women see it.  I think I'm kind, and intelligent, and interesting, and all sorts of other things, but no matter how horrible, cruel, vicious, stupid ANY other guy is, women think he's more desirable than me, universally.  I am utterly unlovable and I don't understand why.  Women just automatically see it.  This isn't a life I have any interest in.  The only way I can bear it is drunk, so that's what I'm going to do.

Anyhow, hope my negativity isn't upsetting to anyone.  Sorry if it is.

Meursault

[radical]

It's not upsetting me Meursualt.

I know the feeling, I think.  It has individual variations. 

You've been through a terrible, traumatic time.  People seem to expect that once it's over it is sunshine and kittens, but there can be a harsh after-effect which can be confusing as well as distressing.  I know it is really tough, because I've been there.  I also know that people do respond to how we feel about ourselves, as well as us often being very sensitive to rejection.

I hope you feel less pain soon.  It sounds like past abusers might be ascendant in your mind right now.  It doesn't change who you are and what that is worth.

[meursault]

Well, I wasn't really expecting sunshine and kittens!  I actually spent the last year warning my therapist that things will likely be harder than ever for a while after that.  I don't know, I'm back to the same nightmare I lived with for 25 years after puberty.  The stuff with my Dad was just a side show.  Even my therapist mentioned it at one point.  I mentioned killing my Dad, and she said "God!  I completely forgot about that!  That's so far down your list."  We had a good laugh.

It's just that now I'm more damaged, raw and vulnerable, less able to regulate, and most of a decade older, and I am still completely unlovable.  And more than ever, I need love and affection and women all just hate me.  I really don't understand it at all.  There is something SO utterly hideous and disgusting about me that no matter how monstrous or terrible or vicious any other guy is, women just all automatically and innately see it in me that I am not a man and pathetically subhuman and less than them no matter how they think or behave toward women.

I'm just going to shut up.  I'm having a complete breakdown.  I was in therapy today and told my therapist I think that comment from that acquaintance and the signals from the woman I'm dating have led me to have a psychotic break.  I was having visual hallucination stuff starting to happen.  The opinion of me that women have just annihilates my sense of self.  There's no me any more.  I'm having an utter breakdown.

sorry for posting this.  I'm completely lost right now...
Meursault

[Three Roses]

You matter.

You are lovable, exactly as you are.

With all your flaws. With all your strong points.

May I say something that might sound harsh? It's meant in the most loving way tho. Honey (I can call you honey, I'm 60 ); honey, it's not that other people don't love you - it's YOU that doesn't love you.

But you are lovable. How do I know? Because I am. Because every single person on this forum is worthy of loving, of being loved. And that includes you.

You have internalized all those messages you were bombarded with as a little boy, I can see that in your drawings. Males are wonderful! Men are GOOD! SO much good has been done in this world by men; and bad has also been done by women. Neither gender has a monopoly on good or bad.

You are very talented. Your drawings are eloquent, I can almost feel the pain you're in.

Stay here with us. Please keep talking, keep posting. Let it out, here. We will listen and tell you you're just as good as ANYONE. I wish I were eloquent so I could communicate what I feel, what I know - that you are perfect just as you are, in your imperfection.

[radical]

Ditto to all the above.

[sanmagic7]

i'm with 3 roses and radical on this, meursault.  those messages you received about men were wrong.  i love men in all their manliness (except they don't keep the bathroom clean enough for me, but that's another story!  lol!)   you are as lovable as anyone else, all us damaged people here who can't always hold it together, who can't always see past our backgrounds, you can't always see the truth about ourselves.  you so matter, and i'd hate to see this place, this world, without you.  you are a honey (i'm 69, so i can say that, too) and worthwhile.  as they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince(ess). 

you've just come through some of the worst years of your life.  of course you're going to be messy, your thoughts and feelings will be messy.  that's normal and natural.  we don't care how messy you  are.  and, you don't bring us down.  all we do is want the best for you - always.  i hope you can fight your way through this.  you're worth it.  i've been glad you've been here through all of it.  we care.  love and hugs coming your way.

[meursault]

Well, I'm drunk.  For the first time in two and a half years at least.  I still know the woman whom I was infatuated with in high schol and after for about four years.  That was 25+ years ago.  She's a pretty good trauma therapist apparently.  She was actually the mentor of my therapist during her training.  I did acupuncture on Tuesday at the clinic she works at and she knows what's going on with me.  I first tried to kill myself over her 26 years ago last month.  Weird.  She has recently seen all my poetry and comics and whatnot.  God, did I love her.  She still just looks like an angel to me, and even she comments on how relaxed and enjotable and comfortably we converse on any subject.  All the abusiveness from me being a kid was all just latent in repercussions until her.  I somehow kept the faith that it wasn't ME as a little kid, it was my sick Mom, omeone would love me.  But then with this friend in grade ten, I fell completely in love.  for YEARS, and she didn't want me.  Everything came crashing into focus.  It MUST BE me.  I am garbage.  Hideous.  A monster.  Unlovable. 

Anyhow, she's been texting seeing how I\'m doing the last couple of days.  She was pretty insistent I come and hang out with her during an empty slot at work, rather than spinning further into self-hatred and into drinking.  I relented and went, and felt a bit better, but beelined for a bar when I left.  She told me she was going to bug me the rest of the afternoon.  She did.

I was about 11 or 12 beers into it.  I called an old biker friend and he came down and we drank.  My old friend texted a bunch of times, and I was just at the point where I was going to head to this sketchy house with a bunch of young punk kids I got into punk in their teens and who live in a dilapidated house in a seedy area of the ciy with a couple of pit bulls  and crap and drop acid.  That friend of mine finished work and asked where I was because she was going to pick me up.  So I texted where I was and she picked me up and we came back to my house for a while.

It was weird.  I utterly adored this woman (starting 30 years ago this coming september).  And here she is sitting on my couch/bed (I'm renovating and living in one room of my house) giving me advice about the woman I'm seeing and talking about our past traumas and high school and sex and her husband and kids and all sorts of things.  I have my teddy bear I got last year when I woke up my inner child.  I just showed it to my therapist a couple of months ago.  I showed it to this friend right away.  She introduced herself and held him for a while.  I told her about my mom some more, and about the sexual abuse stuff with two of my sisters.  Weird how open I was with it all.  She hugged me a couple of times, and I cried a bit about how unlovable I fele and how I only really feel like my therapist is safe and that sort of crap.  Hugging her was strange.  I was just thrilled with the feminine-ness of it all, her perfume, soft hair, breast etc, but mostly I just didn't want to engage.  I spent  a lot of terrible years just suffocating with attachment need stuff for her and just want to enjoy a platonic connection now.  I'm very comfortable with her that way!  I didn't want to get stupefied by how wonderfully female she is.   She genuinely looks almost the same as she looked since she was 19 or 20.  It's weird.

She told me about her sexual assault back then, but I already knew about it.  She told me then.  She thought she hadn't told anyone until therapy years later.  Felt kind of bad, because I couldn't remember who the guy was until she told me again.

WE talked about quite a bit of stuff.  She stopped us talking about sex at one point because she said she was getting excited.  I didn't want that and neither did she. 

She left and I immediately went down to the sketchy beer store a few block away and got a case of beer.  I'm now drinking by myself.  Maybe I'll get it back, but right now this is my thinking:  screw it all.  I'm unlovable and give up.  I'm never going to have that romantic love.  I'm never going to experience the awe of seeing a woman in a wedding dress for me.  I can't even really envision that happening, it awes and stuns me so much.  I'm never going to have a partner to have and raise kids with.  I'm never going to have some woman who comes home from work to stories from me about our dumbass kids and the hilarious stuff they've done.  I'm never going to have a chance to show a kid of mine, by my example, something important about how to live or be or interact.  I'm never going to have a son who knows how to be a man from his Dad, or a daughter who faces the world knowing she is loved and a strong Dad has her back.  I am unlovable and I give up.  IT's all meaningless, so I am just going to at least spend my time getting drunk, because women seem to at least want to sleep with me when I'm drunk, even if there is this universal indictment that I am unworthy of being loved or a partner or a Dad or any of that genuinely amazing stuff.  I've given up completely on the woman I've been dating.  I am getting too many rejection messages, and am too fragile and vulnerable to even try to address it all...

Anyhow, I'm still pretty unhappy.  But I'm also having beer.  It's a crappy solution, but it's the one I have to work with.

Meursault

[sanmagic7]

all i can say is that you're doing the best you can, and i hope you can find your way back to being kinder to yourself.  you were doing that for awhile - i hope you can do so again.  best to you, meursault.  big hug.

[Three Roses]

 

I care for you, M.

[meursault]

I feel kind of ashamed for losing it the last couple of days.  Anyhow, the woman I've been seeing said "maybe" we could do something today.  If she calls I'm going to just say it didn't sound promising so I made other plans.  I give up with her.  I sang and played guitar doing a really slow dirge-like version of Self-Esteem by Offspring this morning. 

I honestly don't understand what's so bad about me.  Just decades of indictment from women that there is something so hideous about me I'm not fit to be a partner or have kids with them.  I honestly don't understand.  I think I'm actually pretty good socially, and lots of women I know talk about how easy I am to talk to.  Maybe I just freeze up too much when romance is a possibility.  and then Ithink how at least half the guys I know with wives/girlfriends treat them like crap, and yet are somehow still considered lovable and I'm not. 

Really, I'm still completely in a tizzy right now.  I'm trying to be positive, but I really have no faith.  I spend a lot of time just suspending that judgment and go out hopefully trying to find someone and not fully believing there is something fundamentally unlovable about me, but then enough time passes and I get so many messages of rejection, it would be insane to not accept it.  Anyhow, sorry for my craziness...

Meursault

[Wife#2]

Meursault - First, this is YOUR journal - all feelings, thoughts, gripes, vents whatever you need are allowed in here - this is YOUR place to express YOUR self free of judgment.

I don't have any answers for you. Lots of sympathy and even empathy from having been there, though. I do consider myself lucky that one man took a chance on me. It happened so late in my life, though, that only one child was possible. I was self-aware enough to realize that my best shot might be marrying a man with children already. Which I did. Making possible the confusing reality that my grandchild is the same age as my only biological child.

When I did decide to put myself out there, I prayed a lot, I joined every website known at the time (lots of hookup websites - not what I wanted). I worded my bio carefully to weed out the one-shot-and-gone fellows. Yes, I may be damaged, but I deserve love, too. Yes, my husband may be damaged, but he deserves love, too. Yes, you may be damaged, but you deserve love, too. Let me repeat that in case you missed it.

Yes, you may be damaged, but you deserve love, too.

I like that you respected yourself enough to not put yourself on the 'maybe' waiting list. That was good, not easy, but good.

When it comes to freezing up, that makes total sense! Really it does!

Personally, and this was a tough one for me so I get it's hard, I'd recommend not looking at the neighbor's green grass too much. You don't know the amount of *, I mean fertilizer, that's been tossed on that grass to make it so green. I did that a lot. It hurt my feelings unnecessarily. Of all the marriages I saw when I was single and jealous only half are still together. Some of the friends have been through two divorces and chosen to remain single from now on. It isn't so much about them being worthy of love - WE ALL ARE WORTH OF LOVE, YOU INCLUDED - it's more about making a choice to move the relationship forward or ending it. Without overwhelming the one we want to move forward with.

Some days I'm singing 'Love, soft like and easy chair'  other days, 'If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with!'

Hey, that last one, it's a good one even if you're alone - still love the one you're with - yourself!

[sanmagic7]

wife2 is so wise!  meursault, i completely agree with what she said.  there are no answers, only faith.  after 2 rotten marriages, i finally found a man while i was in my 50's.  my grandma found a man to live with when she was in her 80's!

i'm just saying, we really don't know what's around the corner.  loving yourself, tho, i believe is the best place to start.  i don't know if you act differently on dates where there's a romantic element involved than when you're around friends.  only you know that.  i do believe that if you can just be that guy who's comfortable to talk to, who's comfortable to be around, who's likeable and friendly and fun, you're going to go through life much more comfortable with yourself as a whole.  then, things will happen as they will happen.   best to you, dear meursault.  you'll get there.

[meursault]

I hear you on all this and it's likely right, but the agony of this is too much.  With my therapist I realized it's really these fundamental attachment needs that overwhelm me.  I don't know how this is even possible to get to a place where I love myself.  How does one do that?  When that attachment stuff is as agonizing and desperate as a need for air.  Not kidding...  I was writhing around on my couch feeling like I could explode yesterday, my heart Pounding so hard I was literally half deaf, cognitively chaotic and stunned, shaking, crying, arched back.  All sorts of stuff like that...

I don't know how it's possible to get to a better place when I am getting the implicit message constantly that women just SEE how I'm garbage.

Anyhow, I'm pretty ashamed of myself for the last couple of days, and am completely demoralized. 

From my perspective this is all very crazy-making.  I think I'm a decent guy.  I have all sorts of things I can do, and think I have all sorts of good traits.  Most of my friends are women and they just universally say there's nothing wrong with me and I just haven't met the right person and all that, yet I go on year after year, sometimes I lose all hope but for the most part I keep trying.  It's like I'm being verbally told the house is not on fire and yet I can't breathe and keep getting burned.  I don't understand any of this.

I'm pretty worried I made my therapist mad.  I sent her an email venting about why women won't just tell me what's so bad about me and that sort of thing.  There was definitely some anger in it.  I said I realize I'm kind of expressing an unfair general anger toward women in it but it was certainly the way I feel.  I just don't understand what women all seem to see that makes me such garbage.

I'm physically exploding right now.  My heart is like a hammer and my brain is like lightning.  This is awful and I feel nauseous.  To just cuddle up or hold hands with someone right now.   Ugh.   I remember a news article a while ago about people offering cuddling services.  I looked into it but it's not in my city.  That might help, but I don't know.   I think it's kind of important that the woman wants to be with ME.  Anyhow.

I kind of think I deserve love too, actually.  But no one wants me.  IT's really something I'm completely powerless with.  It's not my choice.

Meursault

[Three Roses]

Wishing I could send you a physical hug!!!

[meursault]

Thanks, Three Roses!

Here's another one of my comics:  WARNING:  suicide!  http://wps999.blogspot.ca/2017/01/comic-1-12-aliens.html