I Wasn’t Getting What I Wanted.
In my head, my life was slowly becoming a hell. Instead of getting happier and growing up, I felt like I was regressing: sad, empty, and feeling more alone than ever.
Larry and I fought regularly, usually at night. He worked all day, and I slept all day, and I never wanted to let him sleep when we got home from the bars. For some reason, Larry didn’t seem to have any interest in staying awake with me.
I didn’t understand this.
I didn’t understand why Larry didn’t feel compelled to explore the meaning of life, or analyze our relationship, or contemplate what happens after you die, or compare and contrast religious ideals, or discuss the various career paths I might want to take, or contemplate the meaning behind Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or talk about suicide methods, or create art out of cigarette ash.
These are the things I wanted to do when I got home from the bar. Larry, who had been up since sunrise, wanted to sleep.
So I would philosophize alone, writing poetry in the margins of take-out menus and scrawling animated stick figures on napkins and creating elaborate spirals in table dust. I felt like the only person in the world who was still awake.
I considered night “my time.” But I felt so incredibly lonely. Bonnie was in college with new friends, and everyone I’d known previously had moved on with their own lives. All I had was Larry, and we weren’t exactly friends.
I felt locked inside my own private cocoon, with no idea why I felt imprisoned while insisting I was “free.”
My overall mission in life was to maintain a feeling of apathy that was so strong that I would never know pain. Sometimes in my apathetic misery, I’d slice at my wrists with a razor blade, flirting with the idea that I could disappear.
I wasn’t getting what I wanted from the world, and I wanted someone, somewhere, to know that.
Then I’d wake up every morning realizing that, no matter what had happened the night before, my agony had reappeared. I woke up hungover but highly conscious of my own distress.
I could never identify why I had so much mental anguish.
But I needed to find some way to squash it. On work days, I drank copious amounts of Diet Coke and chain-smoked cigarettes. During my four-day weekends, I would start with a cigarette, then Diet Coke – as much as I could consume – then a trip to the bathroom (sometimes to vomit), then back to the fridge for a beer.
If the beer was gone – as it often was – either Larry was walking into the apartment with a 12-pack or I was on my way to a bar. I rarely went an hour on the weekends without putting alcohol into my system.
And then, slowly, the pain would dissipate.
I believed that all I needed to do was drink, and write, and create, and play the guitar, and sing, and dream … and eventually I’d magically become the person I was meant to be. I didn’t consider visualizing my life in five years, or setting goals, or making plans, or taking any action steps.
To be honest, I didn’t know what I wanted to become, unless you count “rock star.” I just knew that what I wanted to become was not what I had become.
And I was starting to realize that whatever I was becoming was not what I actually wanted to be.
Simultaneously I had no idea who – or what – I was.
