Pt. 2 - Love & Neurotic Misery

If love and misery aren't synonyms, they ought to be.

Pt. 2

I am writing this to put onto paper what I have come up with after months of therapy and introspection following a particularly distressing period of time. 2015 has been the most difficult year of my life thus far (at least in terms of emotional/existential issues), and I know that much of that hardship was a direct result of my actions and mindset throughout my life. I have nobody to 'blame' for what has happened or the many months I have spent feeling haplessly crazy, depressed, frantic and alone. I, as much as anyone can be, control my own destiny, and I allowed myself to fall into habits that were so unhealthy that they led to an eventual mental breakdown, and the most terrifyingly complete and total depression I have yet experienced. A complete overhauling of my own psyche--and lifestyle, mentality, daily habits, etc--was required in order to even attempt to start putting the pieces back together. 

Considering a month ago at this time it was difficult for me to even eat solid food once per day, I have made great strides in understanding my own behavior, and can now cognitively hold myself responsible for my thoughts, actions, and intentions. For the first time in my life I know fully the kind of person I want to be, and I spend a good deal of my free time carefully adjusting myself to be that person each day--through my interactions with others, through the way I think of people, through my every action and word.  It's been an incredibly difficult year, but I know that these obstacles were necessary in order to further grow as a person (and furthermore, to grow into a mentally stable, empathetic, decent human being--which I have not always been in the past).

Most of these problems were probably present from adolescence, but I am not the only person to grow up an only child with parents that were separated, and I am not the only person in the world who had parents who were not as good as they could've been. Early habits I began absorbing were ones of introversion and fear of others, blocking people out so they couldn't affect me more than I allowed them to. This manifested itself later into not truly connecting with people who were close to me as I was supposed to, and every one of my 'close' friends would have to deal with how unstable and oftentimes hostile I was. 

As an adult, I found a few good friends who were willing to stick with me despite my erratic behavior and mood-swings. The few relationships I had as a teenager and in my early 20's were always unhealthy and lopsided, with me either keeping the person at a distance and remaining emotionally detached on a deeper level, or devoting too much time and effort into something that was obviously not wholesome or healthy--IE, moving in with an ex-girlfriend in 2012 even though we did nothing but fight beforehand, and I had been hospitalized only a month before for cutting my wrist open because I couldn't handle how trapped and meaningless she made me feel. 

I clung to that particular relationship because, even though it brought me no happiness, I was incredibly afraid of losing somebody I 'let in' to my personal life. Once it was over I realized immediately how many sacrifices I had made that were completely unnecessary and unhealthy, and it only took a few months to realize I was better off without someone who constantly put me down and made me feel like less than a human. Unfortunately, the ending of that relationship was really only the beginning of my problems, as I was overcome with a need to feel emotionally validated and important, especially in the eyes of the opposite sex. This led to roughly a year of increasingly unsavory behavior--talking to and flirting with as many women as I could, in an attempt to validate myself and feel like I was worthy of affection and attention, the things that I was constantly deprived of in my last long-term relationship. 

I realize now how unstable I really was then, because it wasn't just the opposite sex that I acted like this around--all of my friends had to deal with someone who was constantly volatile and aggressive; trying to prove myself by acting tough, speaking loudly, fighting with people, et cetera. 

I still had it in me, as I do now, to feel compassion towards people, to do good for others, to care for people and animals, but in 2014 I went on a complete binge of self-justification that led me down paths I would rather die than repeat. I became sociopathic, especially to people I did not know (I surrounded myself with many strangers at this time, even becoming extroverted in order to comfortably live my new persona), and started living a life of hedonism and instant gratification... not just to a small degree either, but as if I was making up for an entire lifetime of feeling unimportant and small.

This leads me up to the first real watershed moment in my adult life, which was meeting the first and only woman I've ever really been in love with. I had fallen into a mindset that I would NEVER love anybody, that it wasn't even possible to because nobody had ever really loved me, and as a result I was acting more selfishly and unconsciously than I ever had before. I spent so many years trying to find someone (even a friend!!) who would jerk me aside and show me how to be really love another person, but I just didn't find that person... until the summer of 2014, that is.

I will never forgive myself for the way I acted then, and it really was the worst behavior I've ever exhibited in my life--the thing I am least proud of, the one period of time I would sell my soul to redo or erase, but I've spent enough months fantasizing suicide and harming myself physically and mentally over it to need to put to paper how miserable it's made me. Suffice to say that my own actions undid my entire way of living, every effort I'd put into pursuing happiness crumbled, and the person I was--insecure, selfish, sociopathic, angry, lazy, DISHONEST, sexually frustrated, dour, but also carefree, funny, outwardly happy, outgoing, etc) died because of the way I was during that watershed moment; I finally found the person who would immediately begin teaching me how to love--myself, her, friends and family--but I was in the worst spot I could've been in for that integral meeting.

As a result, I fell in love without yet understanding how to love myself (which is much more important than I'd ever realized), and many of my habits--control issues, jealousy, fear of being abandoned--reared up just as they did with others I'd dated. However, because she loved me, she was willing to work with me (the first person who actually made an effort, and didn't just leave, withdraw emotionally, or become abusive!), and she taught me that it was okay to be myself, that as long as I tried to improve and remained loyal to her she would always help me and care for me. In a very short amount of time she started to work past my defenses, to really show me that it was okay to trust her and love her and feel confident in myself, and it wasn't long before I regarded her with the same love a captured animal feels towards the one who frees it. 

However, as amazing as I may have felt, I still had that hideous skeleton in my closet--I still hadn't told her about the person I really was when she met me, the desperate, selfish alter-ego that I'd adopted because I thought my real personality would never earn me the happiness or love I so desperately sought. It terrified me so much that I just clamped down on it, willed it to go away, told myself that it wasn't true, but the more I was around her, the more she showed me through her own actions that honesty, empathy, compassion and love were the only ways to really find a lasting happiness (or fulfilling existence). It was in this way that I finally started to realize that I had to tell her the truth about the person I'd been, that no matter what, SHE DIDN'T DESERVE TO BE WITH SOMEONE WHO WAS DISHONEST, because to lie to someone is to disregard them as a person, to disrespect them on a fundamental level, and I just couldn't do that to her any longer.

After I told her the truth about the things I'd done when we met, it all fell apart. She couldn't love someone she couldn't trust, and I couldn't prove to her that I was no longer that way. It didn't matter that I was just going through the motions with those other women, that it was that sociopathic "cool guy in a metal band" alter-ego speaking, when really I had little to no sexual desire for anybody I ever encountered, because I'd never met a single person who made me feel comfortable with myself, nobody who'd ever made me feel like it was okay to be myself around them. I should have understood and accepted it when she wanted to leave me, but I didn't. I thought because I had changed, because I stopped being sleazy and sociopathic and dishonest she should just magically forgive me and move on, but I realize now that that was just another manifestation of my desire to control things beyond my control--because she was close to me, because I couldn't imagine life without her, because she meant the world to me and I truly felt like I would die without her.

It took months of fighting and struggling and desperate measures to get it through my head that no matter what I felt, no matter that I felt like I would simply cease to be if she left my life, it just wasn't right or healthy for me to be her partner any longer. It wasn't her fault for wanting to get away from someone who hurt her and broke her heart, and I made matters much worse by clinging to her SO DESPERATELY that she began to feel like she wasn't a person to me, she felt objectified and unloved and mistreated because I wasn't treating her like a person, I was treating her like a tool to fix my own sadness and emptiness (ironically, the things I should've been fixing all along, the things I should've figured out after my LAST failed relationship, instead of rushing headfirst into hedonism and instant gratification). 

I went to Istanbul, Turkey to prove my love for her, but it wasn't love that needed proving--it was stability, compassion, respect and empathy that needed proving, and I was so distraught and caught up in my own neurotic misery that I failed to see that. I returned from Turkey a broken man, and spent the first 6 weeks upon returning crying over her every day, mourning without end, feeling like life would never again feel like it was even worth living.  As I'm writing this for my own accord--and to read back on, to recall my thoughts during this time--I don't need to spend time writing about the complete and plenary depression that set in then. I'll never forget it, and for good reason: When someone commits a crime, they go to prison. It is in this way that I deserved to be depressed, and I deserved to have myself broken down to nothing: because without real punishment, and real rehabilitation, and real reconciliation, I would have never been able to change into a better person.

I don't want to end this letter to myself on such a melancholy note, either. I have learned the most important life lesson I think there is to learn, and that is that to love someone else, you really, truly must love yourself first. If I hadn't been so unhappy with myself, so desperate for attention and gratification in 2014, I never would've lost this person who I regarded as the Sun to my Earth. If I had taken the time to balance myself emotionally, to stabilize my psyche, create my OWN self-worth and self-esteem, to appreciate the good traits within myself and slowly, systematically whittle away at the bad traits, I would have been in the place I'd needed to be in to actually love someone else (and be loved by them in return). 

The moral of this isn't so bad, even if I have choked up several times while writing it. I have now (as of June 7th, 2015) devoted 2 entire months to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to careful mental readjustment, to learning to love myself and others without ulterior motives, to disciplining my mind and body to be stoic and resistant to damage and unhealthy habits, to learning to calm myself and control myself, to selflessly helping other people, to understanding and employing empathy every second of every day. 

I can honestly say, for the first time in my adult life, that I'm not hurting anybody (or myself) with the way I live my life. I'm not using anyone to make myself feel better, I'm not walking on anyone's feelings to inflate my ego or self-esteem, I'm not dishonest with myself or anyone else, and I have taken great strides to go above and beyond, to be a positive force in the world and not just serve myself and my immediate circle. 

I have had many opportunities to fall back into my old habits, to use someone to make myself feel better momentarily (IE; sleeping with someone to avoid feeling lonely for a little bit), to lash out at the world and be angry and bitter all over again, to block off the love I felt and replace it with numbness and disdain, as I'd always done before. I am proud to say I've done none of those things, I'm proud to say that even when someone approached me as a romantic interest, even though it would've helped me feel better and distract me from the pain I'm feeling, I carefully and politely declined, because I know that that person would have been hurt if I'd used them that way. I work for a charity in my city, donate to another in the middle east, and keep a list of all the good deeds I've done for people--but more importantly, all the things I'd LIKE to do in the future. These things are just the fundamental beginnings to the person I want to be for the rest of my life.

I'm finally learning to love myself, and even though it hurts like a sonofabitch every second of every day, I know this watershed moment wasn't meant to kill me--it was meant to improve me, to show me that other people's feelings matter, to make me the person I've always wanted to be, but couldn't figure out how to become on my own. I've learned to love my friends and family in an honest, healthy way, and I know that I'll never go back to the self-serving mindset I once had. 

I can hope for true love to find me again (or come back to me, as I dream about just about every night), but even if it never does, at least I will have learned to love myself and feel okay about the role I play in the world. I'm not a bad person anymore, and I'm not ever going to be again--this is something I tell myself every day, now.

Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" always spoke to me because I could relate to the pain and loneliness that made Scrooge the way he was, but once he realized how awfully he'd influenced the world, he made his best effort to change--and he succeeded, miraculously, confidently. 

-TI 
6/6/15