Month: August 2016

I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me.

Sometimes I look around me and think, “Man, if I had to deal with someone like me, I’d kick me to the curb!” Honestly, I get how hard it is to have someone you love in your life who is always crying, always in a jam, always in need of rescuing, someone who never has money or a job or medical insurance or a savings account. I never wanted to be this person. Never. When I see people like me I judge them as harshly as I’m sure people judge me.

The thing is, I didn’t set these wheels in motion. The other day I told someone close to me – someone who was struggling to understand why I couldn’t just pull myself up by my bootstraps and push past my problems – that people who have never been chronically depressed have no idea what it’s like to fight your very self. People who aren’t addicted to food (as I’ve had to admit to myself I am) have no idea what it’s like to have your own mind sabotage you. To them it’s as simple as being strong enough and wanting it badly enough to just find a way to get it done. They acknowledge that it’s hard but, hey, they were able to do it so if you aren’t that just means that you either don’t really want to or haven’t really tried. And I’m so god damned tired of trying to explain or make them understand or open a window into my head so they can see for themselves. I’m a loser. There. I admit it.

I said this to someone the other day and they were so alarmed. This was clearly, in their opinion, not a good thing to say. So I think I’m gonna be lonely for a long time. Because I’ve just stopped trying to explain to others and have instead simply begun to distance myself from them.

(I have been crying uncontrollably this afternoon so I’m writing this because I think it helps. I don’t understand why but it seems that when I marshal my thoughts and just lay down in writing what I’m feeling right now it somehow makes this whirlwind in my head stop for a while. I think it also helps that I know no one will read this so I don’t have to worry about how it all sounds or if it makes sense. It’s just for me.)

In My Life

In life there are many ways in which we can find ourselves suddenly dropped into bad situations. At least that’s how it feels. But in looking back it’s unfortunately very easy to see how we got there. Bad choices, bad ideas, stupid mistakes, and sometimes just bad luck. And nowhere along the way do you actually know this is where you’re heading; at no time do you think to yourself, “This choice you’re making right here will lead to another one which will in turn lead to an even worse one AND THEN… bam! you’ll be homeless and penniless and people will get tired of hearing your shit and your crying and your belly-aching and will finally just tell you to quit whining and get on with it.”

I suppose that when I look back I realize that it wasn’t just bad choices (even though, believe me, there were PLENTY of those) that lead me to where I am today. I have had years of taking inventory that have led me to the following truths:

  1. I am lazy. At least that’s what it feels like to me. I just can’t seem to make myself do what I know I need to do. I become overwhelmed so easily. The smallest things make me curl up and want to shut out the world. And at those times it is infinitely preferable to retreat to a safe, insulated world that is filled with food and games and videos. I hate myself for this but I cannot ever remember a time that I thought there was any other way to deal with the things I didn’t want to deal with than to close my eyes and hope that it all went away.
  2. When I was younger, plans for the future were not ever anything I thought of. I felt lost as a kid and in high school I was even more distraught as I watched everyone around me at least knowing what direction they wanted to go in even if they didn’t have all the answers. I had no skills, no passions, I found school to be unbearable and learning almost impossible. The amount of notes I got sent home with me because I daydreamed too much never mentioned how impossible it was for me to understand the words in my school books. Higher education was not ever an option for me. If ever a kid needed leadership or direction to make it through childhood it was me. Oh to have had someone to teach me the skills that everyone else seemed to take for granted. I have been drifting ever since.
  3. I have always, ALWAYS had a crippling low self-esteem and a truly awful sense of self-worth. Since the earliest I can remember my default feelings were ones of self-hatred and always knowing that not only was I not good enough but I was so far below the average that I had little hope of climbing up to a better place. How the fuck is a kid supposed to deal with that? I would cry so much as a child that my mother just didn’t know what to do with me. Out of nowhere I would just be unable to control my tears and my sadness and did not even have the skills or understanding to explain to anyone why I was feeling that way.
  4. The result of all of this was a severe depression that, had it not been for my mother who always gave me a place to live, would have surely ended in a very bad way.

With all of this as a backdrop I developed dysfunctional ways of coping that made things even worse. From the “retreat and hide” method I mentioned above to chronic lying and horrible procrastination. And eating. A lot of eating.

The most disastrous of these coping mechanisms for me was that I relied too much on the opinions of others to help me make decisions. As a result, I made the biggest financial mistake of my life and lost everything. Everything. At a time when I should have been frugal I allowed the ideas of someone else to lead me to a terrible decision because I was unable to say no. What if they thought I was a coward? What if they hated me for not going along with them? Never mind that everything in me was screaming to not do it, to play it safe and say no.

I hate who I am and I hate who I’ve become. I’m an overweight, older woman with not a penny to my name, nowhere to live, no talent or skills that will allow me to earn anything above minimum wage, I’ve burned too many bridges and people are tired of taking care of me or helping me or listening to me complain and I have no significant person in my life to lean on.

So I’m writing. And I won’t over analyze what I write in order to make it smart or witty or entertaining or to paint a picture that will make me look good. This is the unvarnished truth of a loser. I am that person. You all know at least one. Every family has one. The person who is always in some kind of trouble and who just can’t seem to get it together. I wish to use this as a way to tell the truth about who I am no matter how much it hurts.

My name is Kathy and this is Verbatim Anarchy.