At the risk of exposing my inner emo, or at the least, of sounding a little high strung, I still chose to write my first post in over a year at 5:30 in the morning and to name it, “Self Loathing.” If you were wondering whether my journey towards ultimate catharsis and finding inner peace along with the meaning of life had made any progress in my absence, the title should pretty much clear up that “burning need to know”problem for you. Everything else with the word “burning” in the description is selling some kind of genital cream.
But I digress.
There are nights when the level of self-disgust and disappointment that I feel keeps me up all night. It’s hard to describe. There’s some rule set in my mind that states I can’t rest or feel at ease unless some benchmark is passed after which I can say that I officially accomplished something in the last 24 hours, and therefore I am now allowed to rest or goof off, or do anything but overanalyze and distractify and wallow. I feel such intense guilt and worry and yes- self loathing- around this time in the morning when I’ve selfishly chosen to do whatever the f**** I want and do it all f****** night instead of going upstairs at a reasonable hour and sleeping for a reasonable number of hours and thus, it is hoped, feeling reasonably reasonable upon waking. There are plenty of colorful words that could accurately describe me upon waking, but “reasonable” has never been one of them. Unless you just think I was asleep.
Anyway. I wax tangential. I’m starting to feel cold after a night in a tank top and leggings and no need to be wrapped in a jacket. I want to go upstairs but I’m afraid to. I’m afraid of the shame and how it will bloom from my toes to get stuck in my throat and torture me all the way up and then across my bedroom floor, illuminated by sunrise, a sitting duck waiting to be caught in the act of “not sleeping.” From my perspective, that’s not really rest. Better perhaps to sleep less for stretches, but then enjoy my rest when it is won.
This post isn’t really about insomnia. That’s just what I happen to be feeling self-loathing in regards to right now. I don’t really think its insomnia though. As soon as I’m disrobed and on my back or belly in bed, I relax and am generally asleep within minutes. My mind isn’t keeping me up and neither is my body. I’m like the freaking Terminator when I decide to dig my heels in. I have to go upstairs. If he wakes up and looks at the clock I instantly become a weirdo and a danger to myself. Nice. Sigh.
Today has been one of those days where I’m not sure if I’m seeing things in general for what they are in the present, or if every other day is when I’m seeing an illusion. As far as I’m concerned, at any given moment, you could ask me and either explanation could potentially be plausible. One thing is for certain, however, and that is that I’m not happy. I can’t safely put my finger on why, however.
I mean, it could be a lot of things, and is ~ it’s fear, mostly, manifested in other emotions. Also, my house is filled with cats that don’t belong to me for the moment, and I know for a FACT that this in itself, comical though it may sound, is driving me a little crazier each day.
First, one major issue I’ve been having lately is issues with feeling crowded and trying to come to terms with the fact that, if I stay in the relationship I’m in right now (which by the way i intend to do) I may never have a certain kind of privacy again. Can’t lie- that scares me. He doesn’t get it, but that’s OK because it’s nothing against him- its me. No seriously.
For example, right now it is 3:38am and I am in the garage writing this and feeling guilty for sneaking of the bedroom when he fell asleep. Yes, I am aware of how pathetic I sound feeling guilty for coming downstairs to write and nothing more, but I DO feel guilty, mostly for having this need at all. For cherishing the only unimpeded wakefulness I get, even if I have to deprive myself of sleep to get it.
I just feel like at every other moment I feel like an asshole if I’m not either doing something productive or doing something with or for my children. A sense of obligation is certainly not a bad thing if the obligations themselves are legitimate, but what makes it a problem for me is that in that state of near-guilt I rarely get anything done. Ditto my late night interludes because not only am I tired, I’m resentful of doing pretty much anything simply because I have to. I know, OK? I know that’s another pretty terrible trait. I am truly ashamed to even write it here, but there it is.
Thing is, before I was cohabitating, my level of productivity was far higher. Of course that’s not all that’s affecting my worth to society, but more on that later. Apparently I’m running low on storage space, says my device. I’d better handle that.
One of the most important questions I’ve asked the latest psychic vampire to latch herself firmly to my jugular and proceed to sip just slowly enough to make me question my sanity on multiple occasions is this: if you care about me SO MUCH, then why the hell can’t you respect my wishes and just let me go? I didn’t really ask her this, of course, as for the last five weeks 1’ve been refusing to respond to her in any way, shape, or form. This approach, of course, has been no deterrent for her at all- in fact I almost think things have gotten worse since I changed my phone number and stopped responding to her multitude of desperate attempts at communication.
Speaking of this, this experience has made me painfully aware of my internet presence and just how many different options such an individual has for torturing me. And I’ve done it to myself, I guess, by creating a hundred public profiles and giving all of them my personal email address and access to my Facebook profile. I often go the Facebook login route, because the thought of “creating an account” is often, especially lately, too much to bear. It isn’t solely a question of sheer laziness. more often, its the inappropriate level of seething rage at being asked to create another account at yetanother website so that I can hurry up and do whatever brought me to the website in question in the first place, although by the time I’ve created an account and verified my email address (because God forbid this random website not have FULL AND UNRESTRICTED ACCESS to my increasingly distracted brain at all times via my inbox) I have, nine times out of ten, forgotten just what that was in the first place. I always end up creating the stupid account anyway, one way or another, and then inevitably spend the next six months groaning as I wade through the veritable AVALANCHE of inane promotional material from said website that 1 only visited to do that one thing that I can’t for the life of me remember.
I know why every site nowadays wants you to create an account, because I am the proud owner of a a useless Business Degree. Actually, the truth is, I learned what I know about internet marketing on my own, through trial and error and lots of studying because employers would much rather read ”thoroughly understands SEO and how to use it to boost profits for a site” than “Eventually earned painfully expensive Business Degree” on a resume.
Oh, but I digress.
So, the stalker. I am not an alarmist. I do not use this term in a joking manner- she is really stalking me. Harrassing me. The list of avenues this woman has used in order to make contact with me is dizzying. Not a day goes by without a “visit” from the stalker fairy and honestly at this point, I’ll be a little nervous when that day comes. Am I afraid of this person? Not in a physical sense. I think I could take her. I worry about my sanity. I worry about my reputation. I worry about my family somehow being caught in the quicksand that is…I won’t say her name. Let’s call her Voldemort for fun. As I write this, my phone has lit up twice with emails from her. She seems to enjoy sending me links to information about different psychological disorders because it hurts less to believe I am simply crazy, have multiple personalities and/or am a sociopath than to believe that I do not care to have her in my life anymore, although I have said so in no unclear terms on multiple occasions. To illustrate, here’s a screenshot of the latest from…er…Voldemort:
Voldemort sends another “helpful” email to Ophelia. Sigh.
Every time I think that she’s finally either gotten the hint or become distracted by some other beautiful butterfly of hopelessness and intrigue, I get an email. Or a text. Or a facebook message. Or a google hangout message. It doesn’t stop, just ebbs and flows, and I find this to be horrifying and also a conundrum. In my other life, I am a musician, and I, at one time, was excited by the fact that forty two pages deep into a google search for my name, I still found relevant content. Now I cringe. Now I have effectively removed all traces of me from the internet under my control to remove. I have asked that my Facebook and Google+ profiles not be indexed by Google. I have spent HOURS poring over every setting I could find on both networks to reduce the amount of public information related to me to the lowest level while still maintaining a personal page for the sake of the few people I can’t communicate with elsewhere as well as my music career. I have, in a sense, become afraid of the internet as it relates to my true identity. I just want to turn it off, sometimes- you know?
Maybe you don’t know. Maybe I am experiencing a very lengthy psychotic episode full of paranoia and fear as Voldemort’s article suggests. But I think I’m just sick of being stalked.
I just turned 30. I’m not sure if that has anything to do with my recent paradigm shift of sorts. Maybe it has something to do with Edward Snowden- also 30- and his unprecedented decision to out the NSA and their dastardly doings. Perhaps it’s because I’m about to graduate with a degree and I have no idea what I want to do with my life, compounded by the unpleasant, sneaking suspicion that I might not know who I am anymore. And the chances of me figuring it out in my current state are dismal at best.
My current state: My phone is rarely out of my hand for a millisecond. It has a well-worn spot on my bed next to my pillow where it charges while I sleep. In the morning, it wakes me up. After pressing snooze the maximum number of times before I’m unforgivably late, the first thing I do is tap and swipe through the multitude of notifications that have inevitably appeared overnight on my device. Before my morning routine is complete, I must tap through text messages, bank alerts, Facebook notifications, Facebook messages, emails, news alerts, weather alerts, app updates, and game requests. But wait! There’s more! l forgot about 6oogle Hangouts messages, Yahoo emails and LinkedIn updates. “You have received a Snapchat message!” “Someone said something on Twitter, which was re-tweeted by someone you know!” “Someone has just Whispered in your area!” “Someone somewhere did something and it is imperative that you know about it RIGHT NOW!”
Sigh.
I cannot start my day with a clear head until every last bit of red on my home screen has been removed and my notification bar is empty. Sometimes this takes a half hour. Whatever time is left after this process is complete I spend lurching around in slow motion, tying shoelaces, excavuating homework assignments and acquiescing the requests of my very vocal cat.I perform these tasks on autopilot because my mind is inevitably somewhere else–specifically, my mind is on my phone, and even though my phone is most likely in my hand, ready to notify me at the slightest hint of activity in cyberspace, I keep unlocking the screen and absently tapping around, looking for any pertinent info I might have missed. Never mind that I’m missing my 6 year old daughter whistling for the first time after 3 weeks of agonizingly unsuccessful tries. Never mind that l’m tragically unaware that my 9 year old son has stuffed his guinea pig into his backpack because I wasn’t listening when he asked if Elephant’s cage was an essential part of Bring-Your-Most-Obnoxious-And/Or-Fragile-Pet-to-School-Day. I’m too busy mentally penning a shockingly brilliant reply to a decidedly uproarious political post on Facebook while photographing a stain on the kitchen floor which suspiciously resembles Elvis for upload to my various image-sharing accounts. Before you know it, it’s five to eight and the kids are going to have to suffer through school lunches because I forgot (again) to make them sack lunches. They’ve probably been up for several hours, incidentally, compared to the fifteen minutes l’ve likely been fully conscious. I’d feel guilty about all this, but I simply don’t have the time.
Why don’t I have the time? Funny you should ask, as I was just wondering that myself. Part of the problem is that the sheer volume of notifications that I receive throughout my day is dizzying. I have to keep my phone on silent at all times. Eventually, I figured out how to turn off LED notifications as well – because if I hadn’t taken these steps, I’d probably be drooling on myself in a padded room somewhere, inevitably crying about my phone, my phone, where’s my fucking phone I need my phone. I need my phone, you see, because at any given moment, someone or something is demanding my attention. Read on, brave fellow phone addict or thoroughly disgusted yet distressingly curious lost person who stumbled upon this long-winded diatribe of phone-induced woe in their search for something totally innocent like a new case for their brand new pho – hey! Whatcha got there? Oh. Well two processors are ok, but I haven’t been impressed by anything under four in AT LEAST two weeks. Moving on.
Where was I? Oh yes! Attention! This is, I have learned, what makes the world go ’round. And my attention is in short supply these days. How did this happen? Who are these people texting me, and why- oh why– do they never cease?
Tune in tomorrow to find out the shocking answer to this, and other exciting information, like: “What kind of phone do I have?” and “Am I an Apple person or an Android person?” as well as “Am I SURE l’m not an Apple person? (because I really sound like one!)” and more!
opheliaorion 