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My sister’s boyfriend keeps buying me flowers

Every few days I come home and there they are. He freshens them up, he adds more, it just doesn’t seem to stop. They’re just always there. 

It’s not what you think. He knows how much I love flowers, how they make me instantly smile, how the smell lifts my spirit when I’m not noticing. He’s watched me deteriorate these past couple of months and he thinks of me and cares about me and wants to do something, anything, to help. Sitting helplessly by as I cry and sink further into depression he reaches for the only thing he can do with impunity. Buy me flowers.

This man who has no connection to me except that he loves my sister. This man who has had more problems and abuse in his life than seems possible. He thinks about me and goes out and picks a beautiful bouquet because, “Kathy needs a hug.” 

And when I walk into my room and see them I immediately start crying and think, “I am so not worthy of all that trouble.” That is absolutely what I think, no exaggeration. And I immediately start thinking of how I can “make it up to him”. As if I’ve done something wrong in allowing my grief to overtake me because now he has to do something about it.

Jordan Peterson’s Big Five personality assessment says I’m in the 80th percentile for Agreeableness, 66th percentile for Compassion, and 85th percentile for politeness.

The positive(ish) side of these three dimensions is that:

  • I’m  nice, compliant, nurturing, kind, conciliatory, cooperative, warm, considerate, forgiving, accepting, flexible, gentle, patient, empathetic, caring, have a noticeably soft side
  • I look for the best in others, am interpersonally tolerant, do not like to see other people’s feelings get hurt, and am much concerned about the emotional state of others.
  • I’m interested in the problems of other people, and other living things and am concerned about helping other people avoid negative emotion.
  • I make time and do kind things for others (even when doing so may interfere with fulfilling my own needs and interests).
  • I am deferential to authority, generally obedient, respectful, and hate to appear (or be) pushy.
  • I am uncomfortable challenging other people and will try diligently to avoid conflict, and have a more intense desire than average to steer clear of confrontations or fights.

The negative side is that:

  • I am naively trusting, have a tendency to avoid conflict (which leads me to dissemble and hide what I think), and can be taken advantage of.
  • I will lose arguments (or even avoid discussions) and tend not to be very good at bargaining for myself or negotiating for more recognition or power (which can lead to resentment and hidden anger.
  • I tend to avoid or reduce conflict (and will sacrifice medium- to long-term stability for the sake of short-term peace), which means that problems that should be solved in the present accumulate counter-productively across time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these things and how spot on they are. I can see the whole span of my life spent doing these very things. It’s unnerving to see myself so easily pinpointed by a simple quiz when I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure myself out. And even more upsetting is that I can see with ridiculous clarity how, based on these traits, I got to where I am now. Even as I child I can see how these traits guided every decision I every made.

So the other day I was at the car wash sitting on a patio chair waiting for my car to get cleaned, when a very good looking man passed by me and said, “You have great hair!”

I immediately thought of my tendency to be agreeable, my reluctance to graciously accept flowers from my sister’s boyfriend and countless other ways in which I try not to be pushy or selfish or will deflect compliments onto others so that I don’t seem arrogant. And instead I just look straight at him with an honestly appreciative smile and said a very heart-felt, “Thank you.”

He found a chair too and sat there waiting for his lime green Lamborghini to get detailed. I didn’t feel the desire to make small talk or to capitalize on this opportunity. I had been sitting there reading old emails from my ex and trying very hard to hold back the tears and was in no shape to be talking to anyone, least of all a handsome man with a nice smile. I barely made it to my car before the tears started falling as it is. But when I drove away he waved at me and I waved back and for the first time I thought that maybe this was doable. Maybe I could turn my personality around given enough time. And for that one moment I felt content, confident and happy. I pulled over and texted my sister, “Am at the car wash and some guy passed by me and said, “You have great hair! Yup, I still got it.”

To find my way back

The recent breakup I endured had left me no choice but to describe myself as traumatized. I do not like admitting that what I went trough was a trauma because it scares me tremendously. But I can no longer deny that it has left me beyond my ability to cope with daily life. I can’t sleep, I can’t concentrate, I cry uncontrollably 5 to 10 times a day. Weeping, sobbing, wailing. Anyway you look at it I am destroyed. 

And it scares me because I’ve never felt this way before. This feeling of worthlessness of misery of sadness to deep I can barely cope. My sister has watched me deteriorate and is helpless to assist in any way. Hell, even I don’t know how to fix this.

So, I have embarked on a hard target search to better understand why my brain works the way it does, why I make the choices I do and more importantly why I feel things so strongly. I have taken three personality assessments (The Big Five Personality Test, The Highly Sensitive Person Test, The Attachment Style Test) to figure out how to improve my life. And to my great shock I have uncovered the what I would call the blueprint for the course my life has taken. It’s not anything that really came as a surprise to me but to see it all laid on in writing like that… I’m not gonna lie, it’s hard to take it all in because the implications are overwhelming.

I’ve laid out everything over several documents and have begun researching the results of these personality assessments as well as the theory of Learned Helplessness with the goal of altering the traits I possess that have taken my life down its current path. While none of what I’ve learned comes as a surprise, piecing it all together has allowed me to clearly see the patterns that are so necessary to understand in order to create real, sustainable change. The discovery of just how badly I’ve allowed my physical, mental and emotional life to deteriorate (consciously as well as subconsciously) has left me speechless.

I have set, and continue to meet, daily goals to read the books I’ve bought, watch instructional and informative videos, and write in this blog. The information I continue to learn as I do this has led to very painful insights.

In addition, based on everything I’ve learned (and continue to learn) I have begun the arduous task of daily mental and emotional corrections, which are needed steps to keep my depression from returning. These are, at the moment, proving to be very painful and very difficult given the depths of misery, sadness and worthlessness that my partner’s elimination of me from his life has created.

There are 2 goals I am currently focused on. The first is the hourly realigning of my thoughts as I attempt to drag my mind back to the present every time my emotions, memories or ruminations veer in the direction of my relationship with Him. The magnitude of this task is proving to be beyond me at the moment, as I have very little control and fail 50 to 100 times a day.

The second is to control the sadness and despair that overwhelms me and which both drags me down into misery and depression and causes me to cry uncontrollably. These are two things I am experiencing that are drastically and negatively impacting my waking hours and causing me to only get 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night, even 5 weeks after the event.

I have never been this motivated in my entire life and I’m upset to have to admit that the biggest reason for this motivation is the distraction it gives me from my emotions, which are very negative and severe right now. When I concentrate on this search to find my way back, my mind does not have to remember how little I meant to this man.

Here we go again

It’s been almost 5 years since I wrote in this blog. In that time may things have happened. At the time I had nowhere to live, no job, a dying car and was living on food stamps. But, I also had a boyfriend and some close loyal friends.

I’ve come a long way since then. I got a job, a new car, I moved in with my sister and her boyfriend and most importantly, I started enjoying life. I am polyamorous and so was my boyfriend so as the years went on he and I started spending more and more time together and we became primary partners. I am not a sexy person and have never been someone who men chase after. So to have someone desiring me and using me the way he did was heady and thrilling. (I say “using me” in a very good way. We were both kinky and engaged in a consensual power exchange with me at the bottom and him at th top.)

So things definitely improved for me. I was happy as I’d ever been and I absolutely loved and adored this man. He was my world. Unfortunately the things I’ve written before now about my debilitating personality traits as well as my physical health have not seen much improvement. But my depression I, thankfully, have been able to pull myself out of. Don’t ask my why because i still don’t know.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that my boyfriend recently dumped me. After 7 years I was brutally cast aside in favor of someone younger, healthier, more successful, cuter, petite, demure, thinner and sexier than me. I was told that my services were no longer needed and I was cast aside. This breakup so devastating that it has left me barely able to get through the day.

The despair and worthlessness that overcame me as I struggled in the weeks and months that followed this event were beyond anything I could have ever imagined possible. Words cannot fully express how crippling this event was to me. Made worse by the fact that because I thought I was a strong woman, the possibility of such debilitation had never even occurred to me. I was not prepared. And as a result had little defences under my belt to counteract what happened.

There are many people out there who have suffered this type of emotional upheaval. We are the walking wounded, the ones people make jokes about. But isn’t this the case with anyone who has not walked in your shoes? If you’ve never known the abyss of addiction, you find yourself impatient with friends whose lives continually falter because of their own doing. They’re just weak aren’t they? After all, if we can do it then why shouldn’t everyone be able to do it? This is an ignorance I cannot abide. There is no one more impatient, self congratulatory and smug than than the person who has succeeded in life.

As I’ve made my way out of this miasma of despair I have learned some very eye-opening and also very sad things about my nature, who I am, why I do the things I do, and how my mind works. These discoveries have given me hope but also have filled me with desperation at how I’ve allowed my life to deteriorate and, more importantly, how much work I have ahead of me.

I’ve tried so hard throughout my life to improve, to be a better person, to create a happier life for myself and those around me. I’m here to tell you that I have failed miserably. At 55 I have very little money in the bank, no real career, no house of my own, no retirement fund and very little marketable talent. I am fat, wrinkled, have varicose veins, cellulite, small sagging breasts that point to the floor, blotchy and blemished skin, brittle nails, body and facial hair that needs near daily elimination, skin tags, ugly feet, a double chin and on and on and on.

I say all this because I am done. I am fed up with not being able to speak my mind and having to curtail what I say because it might offend someone, because it’s not proper or it’s not positive thinking, or it’s depressing or “you’re in your head too much, Kathy” or “why do you have to show every emotion you’re feeling” or ‘what’s wrong with you will you just stop talking already”.

If you’re reading this be warned, I give zero fucks anymore. You don’t like my writing, you think it’s not productive, you think there’s too much talk of sex, nudity, orgasms, the ugliness that is me? Well there’s the door my friend. I am done. This, is Verbatim Anarchy, and here is were I speak my mind.

Lost

I am a lost and lonely. Today I walked the halls of this house in the dark, trying to understand who I have become. I’ve already lost this place to live. It is no longer mine. And yet here I am, inhabiting it for a few precious days more. How long, I don’t know. I only know that already I do not feel safe here because it is already lost to me. I am already making mental lists of what I will have to leave behind, what I will need to take with me and what I will attempt to let go of. It is an awful thing to have to abandon one’s possessions. To decide what will stay and what will go. And at those times you question everything. Who you are without them, what they meant to you in the first place, what place they could possibly have had in your life if in a heartbeat you can so easily leave them forever, never to look upon them again.

I’m no stranger to it. I had to do it once before, long ago. I left the most precious of things behind. And the memory of that last day still haunts me. Of driving away, of not looking back, of the terror of what lay ahead.

And here I am again. Having to leave where I live. I sat down on the couch to read a book and realized this is the last time I will be able to do this, the last time I will have peace and solitude and privacy. Probably for a long time. And already I feel suffocated, as if I will have to watch every step I take from now on because people will be watching me. Where I’m going is a public place and as such I will have no claim on it. When will I relax? When will I be able to shut my mind off if everything Ii do will be scrutinized? I can hardly stand it.

And yet, I have no choice because this is what my life has become. And I blame no one but myself. I am ashamed of what I’ve become. The long walk back will be so long, so painful and so slow. But most of all it will be lonely. Because no one can share this with me. There will be no one alongside me to give me strength, to hold my hand. I have relied on the company of others for so long I do not think I can do this alone.

I am astonished at how incapable I am at dealing with life; how the smallest of things terrify me and make me want to run and hide.. How is it possible to have lived this long without realizing this very basic fact about myself? Imagine being thrown into the middle of an arena where you will be forced to face the thing that terrifies you the most. That is how I feel, for surely that is what is in store. for me. I put on a brave face when really I want to howl at the heavens for a rescue.

I can barely stand this.

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.