I feel empty today. Soulless, devoid of humanity. This pain is proliferating throughout my entire body. My chest feels tight, deep, and hollow. My stomach is sinking. My arms burn and my hands are trembling. My throat has a lump in it and my mouth is dry. I sit here in my living room, alone, as I do every night. I have nothing to keep me company other than my own racing thoughts and emotions. It's all I can do to stop myself from cutting myself right now. It would be so gratifying. But I know how unhealthy it is, how dangerous it can be. Especially where I cut my shoulders, one sudden movement can mean slicing my neck right open, piercing my jugular and bleeding out. I don't know if I'm ready to die yet. I want to say no, because I still get a jolt of adrenaline whenever a car whizzes past me when I'm crossing the road. But there are times where I take comfort in the fact that it would relatively easy to end it all, to end this suffering.
Suffering it all I know. When I'm single, I'm depressed, empty, and self-loathing. When I'm dating someone, I'm anxious, obsessive, and tremendously clingy. The anxiety spikes are absolutely dreadful, thoughts race through my that make me question my own sanity, my own beliefs of what a relationship is supposed to be, how I feel about my partner and whether or not I truly love them. It's maddening. I can't eat, can't sleep, I pester them constantly about what's going on inside in my head and what they think, I take panic attack after panic attack at the mere thought of my partner. I get unrealistically upset over the smallest things, like if she goes out with friends without thinking of inviting me, having lengthy conversations with what I perceive to be everyone except me. I vocalize my issues, we fight, I get angry and defensive, then I feel guilty and regretful then apologize. I then treat her exceptionally well to make up for having to put up with my insanity. I do tons of things to show her I care, to illustrate that I'm not all bad, that I'm worth keeping around despite my erratic behaviour and mood swings. This oscillation between extremes generates friction, frustration, and uncertainty in her. Then she says she can't handle it any more and leaves me. I can never be happy, can I?
This is exactly what happened with my last girlfriend, Tiffany. I suppose I should provide some context. Last year when I doing substitute work at a daycare here in the city, I met a girl named Tiffany. We hardly talked at first, but I began to fall in love with her. As we worked together and became more acquainted with one another, we began to joke around together. We fired sarcastic shots at one another often and she was able to argue me to the death. Prior to her, I had not really experienced much of that. I'm a rather sarcastic person with a relatively quick wit and dark, sardonic humour. I enjoy arguing and messing with me for the fun of it, just to elicit a reaction. Tiffany was one of the few people to see through that and she argued back. She challenged me on an intellectual level and that spoke volumes to me. I never had that kind of relationship with a girl before. She was stubborn and headstrong, she was passionate and lit a fire in me that I thought was fizzled out forever. My girlfriend at the time, Katie, was nothing like her. She could not stand debating with me and most conversations just ended up with her getting flustered and frustrated with me. Once I met Tiffany, I began to realize that I wanted more. I wanted the passion that I thought I would never experience. Tiffany had so many qualities that I wanted and I felt that with Katie, I was settling. One night, in late July of 2014, I had a vivid dream in which Tiffany and I were dating. I woke up obsessed with the dream, unable to stop thinking about it. When I got to work, I couldn't stop looking at her. She was just so beautiful, scintillatingly radiant, she was an angel. We spent time together talking and joking at work, and I fell head over heels in love with her.
I felt that this was not fair to Katie, so I suggested we take a break while I got my thoughts in order. She went home to Moncton for a weekend, then called me and broke up with me. I didn't seem to mind, truthfully. Our relationship was never built on passion. It was more of just a really good friendship. I honestly never really felt that I was in love with her. Hell, I was hesitant to begin a relationship with her to begin with but she kept at it until I finally relented.
I was talking to Tiffany in late August, the 22nd I believe. It was a Saturday night, she was drinking with some friends at her parents' camp. We began by talking over Facebook and she eventually gave me her number because using data was killing her phone's battery. I called her and we talked and talked. We stayed up until 4am talking. It was incredible. I admitted my feelings to her, I told her I was in love with her. She was understandably weirded out but she went with it. We kept in contact, talking into the late hours of the morning on several occasions and my love just grew. While all of this was going on, Katie was still living with me in our apartment while she looked for work back home. Tiffany and I got together after work almost every night while I tutored her for a course she was taking online with the Nova Scotia Community College. She only had her Entry Level certificate for Early Childhood Education and needed at least her Level 1 to guarantee her permanent position at the daycare. So I helped her out. And by helped her out, I did the majority of the work for her. She certainly had her input as it was her course, but the writing of assignments and projects were pretty much all done by me. That was my fault, I tend to get carried away with school work as academics are something I enjoy and excel at. So we worked together at our friend Jennie's apartment very often. We became close, we hugged and kissed and fooled around a little bit. Though she put an end to that a couple times. She didn't want to get involved with me because she felt like she was a home-wrecker. I assured her that ending things with Katie was something that I wanted. She went on to say that she has a pattern of dating guys who seem nice at first, but then turn into assholes after seeing her. I said that was nonsense and that relationships are two-way streets. Both parties are always at fault for whatever happens. She didn't buy it. But we continued meeting for school work.
Katie moved back to Moncton in November of last year. The first night she was gone, Tiffany came over to study. We ended up having sex. It was incredible, to say the least. Over the next few weeks, she continued coming over on a regular basis to work. Close to Christmas time, our friend Amanda from work informed me that she had been hooking up with her ex. I was devastated and around New Year's, I started cutting myself. I got drunk and cut lines across my wrist and sent her the pics. Needless to say, she was not impressed. She flipped out and made me promise that I would never do that ever again. She said that she can handle a lot of crap but not that. So I promised and things continued on like normal. Because she was coming over so often, she decided to just move her stuff into my apartment and she began living with me Monday to Friday in January. But she was very hesitant to label our relationship. She refused to say we were dating or to start calling us boyfriend and girlfriend. I did secretly but I respected her wishes. Part of me knew that she had a fear of commitment, as was confirmed by basically everyone at work, and that this was never going to work out. But my love blinded me and we continued on. We did so many things together while she was living with me. We worked out and exercised, we cooked and invented new recipes, we watched Netflix, we downloaded all sorts of shows and movies, we played Nintendo, it was great. But at my core, I felt an increasingly intense sense of insecurity, like she was going to leave me, that she didn't love me. I began obsessing on this insecurity, asking myself if my feelings were really as strong as I thought they were. My anxiety became overwhelming. It permeated my entire life. Soon, it generalized to Tiffany herself. Seeing her and thinking about her was enough to make me anxious. It drove me insane. I kept talking to her about it and she kept trying to help me. She cuddled me even though she hates cuddling, she talked me through a lot of things. That helped but only in the short term. The anxiety always cropped up again, worse than before. It was classic OCD symptomatology. Reassurance seeking was the compulsion to my obsessive thoughts, which provided only temporary relief that exacerbated the anxious feelings. We continued living together, working on school work, and having insane amounts of BDSM-inspired sex. One day after work, she pulled me aside and said that we needed to take a break, that it was getting too much for her to handle. I understood why, it made perfect sense. I'm out of my goddamn mind. I'm insane and I've been putting her through so much pain and frustration. On the other hand, I was devastated, heartbroken.
Over the next couple weeks, she moved her things back to her parents and we began talking less and less. Conversations were increasingly focused on my pain and anger towards her. I began getting angry with her over the tiniest thing. I was like a cornered, wounded animal lashing out in pain. Contact ceased altogether a couple weeks ago. My term at the daycare ended and I started a new full-time permanent job at a new daycare. I deleted her from all my social media in an attempt to shield myself from the pain. Her visage still causes me intense anxiety. Just seeing her name gets me worked up. I feel like I hate her. But I still miss her so much. I never fell for someone so hard. I doubt it would have ever worked between us... she mentioned when she broke up with me that we were seeing each other for about a year and since her relationships only ever last a year, it was about time. Though she never even admitted that we were in a relationship or dating or whatever. I feel used. Coincidentally, she broke up with me shortly after she passed her course at NSCC. My parents think she used me to further her career. I honestly don't believe that that is entirely true, but it may have subconsciously played a role. She may have unintentionally used me to. She said she wanted us to be friends for a very long time, but she never contacts me. I feel like I never mattered to her at all, like my love meant nothing.
I'm still in an incredible amount of pain. I've reverted to cutting to help relieve the pain. I broke my promise to her, but I don't care anymore. I obviously mean nothing to her. I feel worthless, undeserving of love, unable to love. I feel empty and full of self-hatred. I chased away the woman of my dreams with my mental illness. She left because she couldn't put up with me. Now I question why anyone would want to put up with me. I caused her so much pain with my emotions, thoughts, and behaviour. I'm an evil monster. I should just stay away from relationships altogether. I'm a loaded gun just waiting to misfire. I cause unnecessary pain in others. I'm a weapon.
I didn't even want to type all of that out, I wanted to avoid thinking about those events entirely, erase them and Tiffany from my memories. I want to say that she did this to me. But it's my fault, entirely. I don't want her belief that she messes guys up to be reinforced. She's a great person, she just needs to figure herself out a bit. If anything, I messed her up. I feel like I want to cry right now. It was painful going through all of that, reliving my experiences as I typed them out. My heart is racing, my mouth is dry, my palms are sweaty, and my eyes burn. I'm feeling an urge to relief the tension with a razor, so I may just do that before bed. Yeah, I know, I'm an emo little bitch. Sure am, I don't know how to cope with these emotions any other way. Hope you enjoyed my depressing and cringe-worthy little vignette.
Until next time.
- K
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