haunted house

I understand that I don't understand.  Any of it.

You'd think by now I'd have an idea, some insight to the secret that I've been searching for all this time.  A long time.  It's not them, it's me.  That's all I can honestly glean from the constant movie-style rejection that I keep encountering.  Be it silence, or rubbing my nose in it, somehow I'm always made to feel like I'm just not good enough.  That something about me is off putting.  Maybe all the articles and advice columns are right?  Maybe it's all about confidence, and ambition, and those primal, basic characteristics that I'm somehow lacking?  I thought being a gentleman would help me stand out from the crowd.  I thought being different would have its advantages.  Clearly I was wrong.  

This is pathetic, I know.  To constantly have to circle back to have the same lesson held up to my eyes time after time.  Sometimes, like right now, I wish I could change.  I wish I could suck it up, crush me into a little ball and throw me out the car window as I drive towards my future.  Leave all the disappointment and doubt and resentment and frustration behind me.  To truly look forward and not have the past hovering over me like the ever present moon in the sky of my life.  But after decades of trying to figure it all out, I'm looking at the future with a more defeated set of eyes than I ever had.

I had a very interesting discussion the other night about 'hope' and how it might just be the most essential, important ingredient in life.  How in today's world, our culture seems to have devalued the idea of 'hope' as being too idealistic...too 'unrealistic' to truly be something that motivates, steers and drives us towards our destiny.  Happy endings are a thing of the past.  The new normal is having the rug constantly pulled out from under you.  To be punched one more time in the gut just when you think you're done taking punches to the gut.  Roll credits, and the crowd walks out in a haze of confusion, while also in a state of inebriation.  A drunken buzz that, while we don't truly understand what we've just seen, we recognize the altered state we now find ourselves in.  The questions.  The doubt.  The thin layer of dread that now coats our being as we walk back to our cars and drive home.  

I just can't take it anymore.  I'm unable to sleep.  I'm unable to find distractions with which to help ease my burden...if you can really call it a burden.  I keep coming back to it, but it feels awfully selfish of me to feel this low, this negative, when there are so many in far worse positions than I.  And that only makes me feel worse.  It's a vicious, unforgiving cycle I'm stuck in.  In good moments I'm somehow able to stem the tide for a few days...able to trick myself into believing that I'm now on the right track, and that this time, this time, I'll succeed.  Things will begin to magically fall into place, and all will be revealed.  The why especially.  But I'm beginning to know better than to let myself get sidetracked with visions of the happy me living a life somewhat close to the vague and foggy existence I've caught glimpses of in my dreams.

I've heard the cliches.  One of my favourite is that it all starts with me.  That if I don't fix myself, if I don't love myself, nobody else can.  That if I don't narrow my focus and find what it is I truly want out of this life, that I'll never attract the people who will help me achieve it.  I sometimes think I'm just not looking hard enough because I've already been defeated.  The negativity pours out of me like a stink and keeps hope at bay.  It forces it to turn its back on me and walk away.  It forces it to not return my calls for help.  

I have an idea of what I need to do, but deep down I'm so crushed up inside that I fear that I'll never be able to do it.  To start to put my life back together again in such a way that I don't need the outside help.  And it'll be precisely then that help will arrive...in whatever form it is meant to arrive in.  But how does one continue to pick himself up off the mat when he feels as if help is not only not coming, but will turn its back when it is needed most.  That it will choose to help someone else instead of you?  That it will reject you because you're too much work, too serious, too 'nice', too weak?

It is at times like these that I desperately want to run away.  Run and hide and never be found.  Find some cave in the side of a mountain and reject everything I've known or thought I've known about hope and love and life.  But it is precisely that thinking that has me sitting here today reeling from yet another in a long line of defeats.  How do I break the cycle when my track record is so full of failure?

The only thing I have right now are the long, meaningless, exhausting days at work.  Home is where the doubt and sadness get their claws into me and rip me to shreds.  How do I get away from myself?  I used to use booze and drugs to change the tune, but then that tune started to haunt me.  It replaced the song I was trying so hard to outrun.  Now I'm clean and sober and I'm right back to square one..only older, wiser, and weaker for having traveled down those roads.  Sure, I pick up a few friends along the way...find someone I gravitate towards like a moth to a flame...only to be burned once again.  And I don't know about you, but constantly being burned still hurts the hundredth time it happens.  You never become numb to being burned.  In some ways, it actually hurts more because you ask yourself why you'd let yourself get burned again knowing how much it hurts?  

I don't trust anyone, because I don't trust myself.  It does start with me.  But I feel like such a lost cause at this point that I can't see a time when I'm finally free of the doubt, the worry, the insecurity, the pain and in a place where those feelings run down my back like water off a duck.  Unaffected and virtually unaware they were even there.  I've done this to myself.  Maybe I was predisposed to it, but I was the one who chose to embrace it...to make it mine...to attempt to turn it into my ace up the sleeve.  If I could conquer all of these damaging emotions, I could do something special with my life.  I would be different, and it would show.  I'd have my own version of success with which to prop myself up with.  

But I was wrong.

I'm not strong enough to carry that kind of weight.  Maybe for short stretches, but not for a lifetime.  Not strong enough to turn it into something usable.  So I sit here feeling helpless, and knowing that I'm mostly responsible for the shit I'm in.  It's an awful feeling.  An all-consuming, total feeling that doesn't ever leave me...especially when I'm alone in the darkness and silence of the night.  I used to be the night.  Now I'm haunted by it.