I remember waking up one day and it hit me - it was me. All of my problems were me now. Officially. At the time I told myself I was kind of beyond caring on a grand scale but it was a pretty devastating realization, to be honest. A realization I didn’t want to even think about. But it put the question in my mind: is it me? Oh, shit, what if it’s me?
I was in my early thirties and had just bought my first home. I was winning. I was standing up for myself, finally living my own life the way I wanted to live it. I’d left an unhappy relationship, severed the ties that were keeping us both away from what we really wanted. And, damn, life was going to be good.
I was working lots but it was stuff I wanted to do. I was making money but I was also very fulfilled in my work. I was depended on, responsible. I made enough to get professional facials every eight weeks and spend $200 on my hair. I was living my life, fooling around, excited to continue. I was old enough to know better but still young enough to do it if I wanted to. The reasons for being unhappy were gone now. I wasn’t trapped in a relationship that wasn’t making me happy. I was financially independent for the first time in my life. I was going to find the man of my dreams and be thin and quit smoking for good any day now. I believed in me and I believed life was amazing and I was going to rule the fucking world. (Excuse my french, Nanny!)
Oddly enough, I spent my first New Year’s in my new life on the floor of my closet. Why? You ask? Because, I don’t know. That’s just the way I did things. I would become a puddle, fall completely apart when life got overwhelming. But that’s not important right now.
Because I met him. The man I wanted to be with. Just like everyone said, one day he would just be there and he was. Online shopping for a relationship. I love online shopping, you get to pick every thing you want and just put in your order. Sometimes what you wanted is on back order and you have to wait a little while. Sometimes it’s really hard to find exactly what you want for the right price, the right size, and you have to go looking for it. Whatever the reason or season, I found him. And everything was going to be wonderful.
But it wasn’t. I fell apart again. Work went to shit, I didn’t want to do any of it. The bills were starting to pile up and I was struggling to keep them under control. I didn’t lose any weight. It was supposed to just fall off now because I had everything I ever wanted but it didn’t. I tried and failed and tried and failed. And I was sick of trying, sick of caring. I fucking hated my life. Eventually I started hating him, too. I was an idiot to think anything could ever work out. It was obvious. There was proof everywhere. What kind of idiot was I to not see it? And I’d lie in bed for a few days, shattered.
Eventually I’d accept my fate and pull myself together. I fixed what was wrong with work and it would get better. I started saving money and getting on top of my bills again. Decided I wanted to try again with the man I’d ordered and ask him to come back. And start the whole cycle again.
Life was going to be awesome, life was awesome, life really kind of sucked. Then it got good again. Then it got bad again. I tried and I tried and no matter what I did, I ended up alone and unhappy. No matter how much I tried, no matter how much I believed, no matter how much I tried, I always ended up at this point. When I was 15, throughout my teens, early twenties, mid-twenties, now my I’m 30 and my ‘I’m going to rule the world’ idiot that always got sucked into everything persona was finally dead.
Whatever was wrong with my life was inside me. It was me. No matter how much I believed, no matter how much I tried to fix it, no matter how much I did to make it all better, it was me. And it was bad.
