The A-Ha! Moment...

You know the nice thing about self-loathing? In this weird way, it forces you to look at yourself and maybe sometime during the evening practice a little introspection.

Lately I’ve felt edgy and neurotic, and kinda-sorta completely without any sense of calm. And so I’ve been chain-smoking and drinking more and feeling consistently agitated. This has in turn caused me to react to certain situations in ways that don’t seem consistent with my personality, and for the last few weeks, I’ve been wondering what the heck is wrong with me. I’ve just felt really insecure and weak and out of sorts.

This whole time I thought it had to do with recent events (namely the appearance of Mystery Man and the not-so-friendly friend which by the way are overlapping stories), but the other night I sat down and figured out that the ‘feeling’ started before all of those events.

So, after a little rooting around in my brain, I came up with the time and the event and moved backwards from there. The answer was relatively simple.

Last fall was a pretty rough time. Job prospects never quite fell through, but constantly shifted underneath my feet. There were months when I couldn’t pay my rent, a situation I hadn’t experienced even when I first graduated from college. Because the career stuff and personal finances portion of my life weren’t going so well, the Boy was kind of a major bright spot in my life.

When things didn’t work out with him and shortly thereafter I found a job, I told myself to move on. All of it was behind me. There was no reason to whine about my bank account or all the worrying now that I’d found this great job and could pay my bills. There was no reason to sit and analyze what went wrong with the Boy when clearly it didn’t work. I was sad to see the relationship end and I moped about it for awhile, but in a weird way, I never looked back over the relationship. No reason to cry over spilt milk. Life goes on! Clean cup! Move down!

Until the other night, when after sending my text messages into space everything suddenly came crashing down on me like a MAC truck. Because Boy had been the one point of happiness in my life during that time, I’d glossed over the bad portions as they happened and never really thought about them again. Suddenly, I had about fifteen bad experiences sitting in my lap and was like, “Oh Holy Cow!”

“Yeah, it was sort of strange,” WTG said to me as we were talking on the phone the other night. “It’s not like you were delusional about the whole thing. Something would happen and the next day you’d be upset about it for awhile, but then firmly announce, ‘Well, I can’t change him. I can only decide whether to stay or to leave, and I like him, so I guess I’ll just have to accept this as part of his character.’ Then, the next week something equally awful would occur and the same speech would happen again, and since you’d long forgotten the events from the week before, you never really looked at the situation in aggregate."

Because I never stopped to think about how the financial situation made me feel, and because I never hesitated to question my experiences with Boy, I also never acknowledged or even thought about how that time period in my life may have affected my sense of self-worth, confidence or attractiveness.

But it obviously did, and that’s why two-three months later I was running around feeling uncertain, insecure, and at my wit’s end. Wednesday morning I woke up, had a good cry, and sat in bed going back over those days slowly but surely. I got to work unbelievably late and was somewhat scolded, but this turned out to be a good thing as well, because now I have regained the motivation to bust my rear at my job.

That night I came home, and instead of reaching for a glass of wine, I realized that I felt more like a cup of green tea. I curled up in bed with a book and put my phone on mute. It’s been that way for the last few days and I’ve gone from smoking two packs a day to less than one without even making a conscious effort. I don’t *need* that glass of wine when I get home, and when I do decide to have one, it takes me forever to finish it. I wouldn’t say that I’m completely back to normal, but I will say that I am much more at peace – not just with myself, but everything else in my life.