sugar | volume one in the brutal honesty chronicles.

As promised (or threatened) to

arabella_hope, this is going to be a Big Emo Post of Doom (tm). It may be that in title only - I'm not sure, I haven't written it yet, but here goes:

I have been soooo absent. Up until August, I was reading but not posting. I felt mute (for various reasons, a large one of which I will confess in this post). Gradually, I even stopped reading my flist, which is something I had never done, ever, in the eight years I'd had my journal. And I *missed* it! I missed you guys so much! I missed posting, I missed having a blog, I missed comments (omg I missed commenting SO MUCH). But I just couldn't bring myself to check my flist. I was... going through some shit.

When I was in the second grade, I had this best friend. She now works in my building and I do printing for her on a regular basis. She's never acknowledged that she knows me, or that we ever watched Spaceballs on Betamax a million times in her hippie dad's shag-carpeted basement swing den. I'm pretty sure this is because we had a sort of violent bff break-up. I don't remember what caused the break-up, but I do remember that the last thing she did in the friendship was accuse me of being emotionally stunted. I couldn't argue - I knew even then that it was true.

My issue with this journal basically boils down to embarrassment. A lot of it is completely irrational. I've felt embarrassed about what I like, what I don't like, who I know, what I do, what I don't do, what I have done, who I am, how I feel. It's this really generalized, crippling embarrassment. It might even border on shame - it's that powerful, and I'm able to direct it at virtually any area of my life. Apparently, I am nothing if not a master of self-sabotage.

Or at least, I have been. Welcome to my plan to snap the fuck out of it by discussing the very subjects that make me most avoidy, regardless of whether you know about them already. Actually, more power to me if you know about them already - do you know how many times I've just let my friends come to quiet conclusions about me instead of using my words? That is not cool. Even if the conclusions were right, that is just not rock and roll. And one of my more minor embarrassment issues is that I hate telling people things they already know, so if you already knew all of this, then I can consider it killing two birds with one stone. More homegrown therapy for me!

So here's my biggest stumbling block, laid bare for you.

A long time ago, I fell in love with a girl. I don't know quite how it happened - I didn't mean to! - but happen it did, and she was, for a time, the brightest light I've ever known. Trouble was, she was perfectly happy to go on being that light for me, but she was never going to love me back. For years, I let this go on, trailing after her like a sick puppy and clinging to stupid fantasies. I was sometimes very cruel to her, because I felt she held all the power, and I wanted to wrest some of it from her, the only way I knew how. I behaved very badly, and I'm very sorry. This eventually drove her away, but even when we lived in different cities, I let her cast such a powerful shadow over me.

I remember talking to

joecaloric about her once, after she'd visited for a few days. "I only feel alive when I'm with her," I said. "I would gladly enter into a life of servitude for her, if it meant being close to her." If the now much kinkier

joecaloric remembers this conversation at all, it's probably a bit titillating to him now. At the time, I suspect it really freaked him out. Of course, he didn't say that. My friends have all been far too nice.

I was heartsick for years about this girl. We were in close quarters for four years, and then I spent another six or so pining, resenting, mourning, wishing, justifying, raging and self-deluding, in no particular order. I stayed away from certain movies because she was in their particular fandom and so just watching the damn movie was too painful. I begged my friends for their opinions and then essentially wouldn't let them get away with telling me anything but what I wanted to hear.

Things started getting better on the painful unrequited love front when I finally admitted it to her face, a few years back. Of course, she knew already, had always known. Neither of us were very surprised. My feelings for her gradually chipped away, little by little, probably through sheer force of will. It was a lot like shoving a brick down a garbage disposal.

So there's already fourteen years, basically wasted trying to climb some big vulgar emotional mountain that never asked to be where it is in the first place. I'm horribly embarrassed about that, and there is nothing I can do to change it. It's part of who I am now.

Nowadays, our relationship is this: we work across the street from each other, and despite this have run into each other all of once in the last year. She's getting married to a very decent chica, and seems very content and wrapped up in her life. In that regard, I am really happy for her, and feel quite a bit of relief.

But then there's this: she's kept me friended on LJ, even when I deleted her in the frantic friends-cut I did this spring. She hadn't spoken to me in a year, yet I felt like she was running a camera over my shoulder constantly, keeping me friended without ever commenting and probably without even reading. It was driving me crazy, gave me a feeling like Big Brother didn't give a shit about me but wanted me to know it still had all the power, just in case. My defriending her didn't help, nor did it prompt her to cut me from her flist in return, which was what I'd hoped.

Of course, I'm dumb and dilute the point I'm trying to make on LJ by following her on Twitter, where my scarce @replies are universally ignored. I think the main reason why I don't just quit entirely is that me walking away means she's won, somehow. Also, yet another situation where I stop following her and she keeps silently following me doesn't appeal. But I know I need to stop giving a shit about that, because walking away completely really is the only thing to do at this point. Not because I can't stand to be in contact with her, but because I can't stand this fake form of contact where we don't communicate at all and where, by virtue of who we have been to each other in the past, she holds all the power.

My best and most practical option seems to be directly asking her to defriend me, which is something I'm not looking forward to doing, and will probably put off a while longer while I attempt to reclaim my journal space in spite of it. There's always the possibility she'll see this, I suppose (er, hiya) and react somehow. That's okay, I guess. Locking her out seems like just another handicap, and there's a difference between posting some identity-coded passive-aggressive lament and what I hope I'm doing: working out my own issues without naming names. Everything I've posted here is true as far as it relates to me and how I've behaved and how I've felt.

So there you have it, the things I am most ashamed of: not love itself, but having made myself a willing fool for it. Being so willing to let go of my own self-worth because of it. Having behaved badly in spite, or because of it. Having wasted half my life at it and still feeling buried by my own baggage. The feeling of immaturity and lacking that comes from never having had a normal relationship at my age. Being ridiculously transparent by nature, yet letting the obvious go unsaid. Letting this affect every aspect of my life, so that it stops me posting my usual meaningless-but-fun drivel here, so that it stops me from going certain places, to save me the unpleasantness, in both cases, of running into her or people who know her (er, hiya). Much as I want to leave them behind, these things are a huge part of my experience. I can't shed them, I just have to accept them and move on.

The most important thing is not to be mute anymore. I feel like this silence started during those months at the start of last year, when I lost my actual voice. It's like I got a taste of erasure, and it fit with how insignificant I felt inside, so when I got my voice back, I didn't use it. I just kept shutting up, literally and figuratively. Now I'm at this messy spilling point, just the natural end to a year or more of relative silence, I suppose. And I am so ready to yell.

volume one in the brutal honesty chronicles.

The first theme