Margaret was right, I have to give it to her, despite trying to hold out for so long.

He is ugly through and through. Enough said.

I really want to indict her for her baseness the awfulness of her personality, but there is no such baseness or awfulness to truthfully speak of. She is no villain in this narrative, as Lucy, my friend/tormentor in high school, was. And yet I couldn’t stop seeing the ugliness in her physical being. It’s an extremely superficial observation, but one that I struggled to put out of my mind. Something about her forced delicacy (in laboriously applying make up to herself every time she stepped foot outside her house) and the sickly sweet sing song cadence of her voice invoked in her the spirit of a toad which had powdered its whole body with talcum to be beautiful. It repulsed me to no end.

I don’t know if I gave her some sort of authority to treat me with contempt – actually it was probably because I bared the most hideous parts of my soul to her every night- but in the end every single word that she addressed me with just reeked of it. Her contempt and her unassailable authority in it. I hated that unshakable authority she always invested in her own opinion. No doubt strengthened by years of people treating her self-pitying monologues with kid gloves. Even her mother (all in all a hardy character) has been reduced to some droll companion because every word of criticism is censored by the fear that dear Margaret might jump. ‘I spent the weekend doing some serious bonding with mom’. How.. fucking.. patronising…

I don’t know why I’m writing this. Part of me just wants vomit this out, so I can get all these disgusting feelings out of my body. But I guess I’m also scared that I’m the one at fault here; that I’m the reason all of this happened. It’s probably not too far from the truth. I’ve also changed, in all my comfort (the amazing apartment that my parents put me up in) and selfishness. To be perfectly honest, I befriended her out of pity, a trait I’ve managed to pick up remarkably well even though I wasn’t brought up with any semblance of Christianity in my life. Then, akin to the way my dad kept my mum to himself out of selfishness, I nurtured her broken self-esteem back to some health out of the same selfishness, as well as a perverted sense of moral satisfaction. How do I manage to make such monsters out of people? Is it my sick desire for legitimacy? For someone to think me a moral saint? Well clearly anyone who knows me to be moral is extremely nearsighted (or just innocent), and the brave ones, the good ones go running in the other direction as soon as they realise. I thought margaret was one of the brave ones, the good ones. But besides the crushing weight of hypocrisy, they’ve thrown in some foolish idealism to boot. I rest assured that anyone who talks as much about herself as that cannot be brave. Even if brave declarations are constantly being made, as if saying them to another person makes them more tangible (and thus lived). She recognised that hypocrisy in June. We always recognise ourself in others.

In anycase there’s no point dwelling these facts. Its happened, that’s all. And all of this introspection is doing my fucking head in. I will cling like a drowning man to my small happiness that I won’t have to see her toad face or hear her sing-song voice again (or at least as regularly).

Anyway in terms of mental clarity at the moment, I’m feeling really great. I’ve felt like it’s about a million times easier for me to articulate myself to friends or in class in the last few months. It seems to come from a newfound ability to temper my adrenalin/nervousness. My voice is just a bit more assured and it makes me feel heaps better to hear it. I’m beginning to surprise myself on that front. It’s also because I’ve pretty much stopped smoking pot (not that I did it that often in the past) and drinking, and basically doing anything that might cloud my mind. Really good decision which I am heaps happy about.

Can’t say I’ve seen an end to insecurity, even though I feel like I’ve acquired far more knowledge on why I shouldn’t be insecure and the ‘self’ building methods to fortify my self belief. While I lecture people constantly on how they should behave, why they shouldn’t react in certain ways emotionally, I myself can’t implement my own advice. When I went to China the other week, I came back feeling particularly shaken about myself. Maybe it’s not bad to be challenged or agitated occasionally.. To shake yourself out of that zone of contentment. But experiencing the flaws of my character in China is very different to the discontentment I feel back home – which is always inevitably to do with a social situation (and the assholes who populate Sydney). All I want is to find people who don’t hate themselves and aren’t afraid to be warm and open-minded and unpretentious. Maybe if I behave that way myself, which I admittedly struggle to on the best of days, I’ll be able to draw people like that.

Meh whatever… I guess my foremost goal these days is to be healthy and a bit more self disciplined and hopefully make something out of my life. Good social situations would be ideal, but you can’t always find yourself in one. I certainly won’t find any out at club/band nights in sydney, because they just seem to draw every wanker who thinks that listening to grizzly bear makes them the coolest person on the planet. So, as a very sober 20year old that is how I’ll end my first address of the year.

So yesterday I was dropped for another girl by pretty much the 3rd consecutive guy in a row. Hah. It’s the story of my life basically. I felt fairly shit for a little while, a few silent tears slid down my cheek, that whole drill. But now I don’t really care. I’m quite amazed by the brevity of my period of distress/unhappiness. My poor dad copped a bit of it though. Anyway, I guess it’s a learning experience. As my photography tutor would put it, ‘life’ seeping through the cracks of my well-organized regime of… reality. Actually I’d be hard pressed to attribute even that level of eloquence to him. But the sentiment would be the same.

I guess it did surprise me a little bit when the guy sat me down, and said, with fairly considered pre-amble, that ‘er.. K is coming back, so.. I’d love to be friends, but anything beyond that…well’. I did get along with him, all things considered. He wasn’t boring or stupid or bad looking (actually he was good looking). I enjoyed the time we spent together. I thought, perhaps naively, that some form of feeling would develop between us.

But in hindsight it doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, I must be the biggest sucker in the world, but almost the exact same thing happened about 4 months ago (same girl, same situation) minus the formal speech of commiseration. And it really doesn’t bother me either. Part of me was working on triple-overtime to come up with any real feelings toward him beyond my own satisfaction that someone was paying a bit of attention to me and that I may be able to have a ‘normal’ relationship. At the end of the day, I never had any real feelings for him even though I tried to find them, despite the fact that I told myself, ‘yeah.. he’s alright. I like him’ (a premeditatedly understated sentiment.. one step at a time sheila.)

I’m a little scared that I’m so wrapped up in my own self-awareness -or that I’m so guarded- that I can’t feel anything real any longer. Neurosis has killed everything organic in my body. I haven’t read Sartre’s Nausea but I’d compare what I’m experiencing to his ‘nausea’ in as far as some form of hyper-intellectual awareness is causing strange physical discomfort. I’d describe it as a sort of dull ache in the back of my jaw. Every time I close my eyes I just see… grey. It might be an expanse of concrete or the back of one of those industrial fridges or something.

This scares me a bit more. Pain seems real enough though. Good old pain, reminding me that i’m still human. Haha. It’s funny how we humans feel each slight and disappointment far more strongly than every act of kindness.

I really hope that I can grow in a positive way from this experience, rather than becoming a bitter, cynical (proverbial) hag. The thing that hurt me the most was probably just my foolishness and naivety – which always seems to be the thing that brings me down. But sometimes it’s better to play the fool and to get hurt, and to know that it really wasn’t you. And there isn’t anything wrong with you. Last night I wondered if I am genuinely unbearable or hideously deformed or what. If anything, I can be too bearable, too easy to get along with. And I’m in no way so unattractive. These little moments of insecurity are inevitable, but I’m glad I can now dismiss them without too much thought. I feel that I have grown in that the list of the things that I’m afraid of is getting slightly shorter. I’m not afraid of being alone anymore. Because being alone is often better than lying to yourself.

Fuck…. I had to take xanax just to calm the fuck down in my own house. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?

And I screamed at my best friend because she was using the wrong cloth to wipe the bench. Do I have OCD? I might.. I feel so anxious whenever anything goes wrong. The mechanism meant for dealing with stress seems to have been wiped from my brain…

2. I am a ghost, a mistake. My life has amounted to nothing. I am a second thought, a passing thought, a forgotten thought. One day everything will turn to dust. My hands are covered in sacrificial blood. If I erase myself, I will reappear everywhere.

We’re still “friends” now, but I write that in inverted commas because it is not really a friendship but some sort of contract that we’ve both artificially constructed and go to pains to prolong. I’ve wanted to cut him out of my life for a long time. But the reasons for it were always duplicitous and predicated upon a hope that he would like me again, “take me back” haha. It was a strategy, you know, “absense makes the heart grow fonder”. On another level it was also motivated by a genuine realisation that what held us together was obligation and nothing more. I’ve become a burden to him, a ward to be dutifully cared for. And I don’t want to put him through the unpleasant duty of looking after my wellbeing. I also want to salvage what’s left of the part of me that I haven’t shown or given to him. I was so stupid. I told him everything. I have become predictable to him and predictably pathetic.

At some stage I resolved to surprise myself by doing something genuinely good and selfless for him. When he told me that he “had feelings” for Alena I tried my best to do this by telling him that I was happy for him, but my bitterness was so thinly veiled that it was a gigantic failure on both fronts. It does really upset me that he’s dating (is that the right word? I hate that word), fucking (?) in love with (?) Alena. But while the thought of them being together makes me madly jealous, what I miss more is what we shared… the intimacy that we had (and that we can never have again). It sounds like such a big fucking cliché but that’s the best description I can come up with at the moment.

I was so bitter about the fact that he was never physically attracted to me. No one who I ever get emotionally close to ever seems to be. I feel like a fool in hindsight because now he doesn’t like me at all. It’s almost as if the feelings I experienced for him have become autonomous of his person. It doesn’t matter how often I see him now, how many hours of his company I can put to my name, I never feel happy to see him anymore. The magic is gone.

I don’t know where to go from here, or what to do. I’m reluctant to talk to him about it because it seems so pointless now. There’s nothing to be salvaged, and for what? I can never mean enough to him for him to want to have a relationship with me and my selfishness and greed prohibits me from accepting this. So I can be saintly and magnanimous and rise above my petty desires and suffer quietly and deeply (because people are made to suffer by their own devices). Or I can walk away. If I chose to do the latter he wouldn’t understand and would probably hate me. I guess in a way he hates me already.

I’ve been trying to convince myself that I don’t care, that it’s not important to me, but that’s such a lie. I can’t shut the problem out of my mind because ignoring it will do me even less good, and it’ll prevent me from being good to him. I wish, more than anything, to be good to him.