The antidepressant must be kicking in. I should be in the throes of a full-on anxiety attack (if the last few weeks have been any indication of a pattern), but instead I’m just curled up trying to block out the dull, maddening pain of accepting the inevitable. that’s the trouble right now: I’m not lost in some groundless depression that will just drift away with the ingestion of a few happy pills. No, I find myself deeply, deeply unhappy again, perhaps moreso than ever before, considering how much hurt I’ve been dredging up once and for all. In a way, I’m fighting the medication: I desperately crave numbness, a release from the acute emotional tortures I keep feeling, and wallowing in a depressive fog is the closest I ever feel to numb. I can sort out why some things upset me and how those things tie to other things, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are things staring me right in the face and shouting in my ears that make me feel miserable in a very real way.
This, of course, has all been very counterproductive to my master plan of nobly facing my demons and seeking occasional guidance without being a burden to anyone. As far as I can tell, I’m worrying the crap out of some people and becoming an unwelcome burden to others. Or another, at least. I can see that I’m less cheerful in public that I can usually muster the energy for. I can see that the effort to catalogue and battle the demons is taking a toll on me personally, and on my life in general.
And the demon leading the pack lately? Yup, that ol’ devil called low self-esteem. You know the one: it’s everybody’s favorite. The funny thing is, I don’t really think I’m all that bad. I don’t think I’m so bad looking, and I’m clever and often quite witty. I’m open to new ideas and I’m considerate and I have a lot of interesting stories to tell. I’m a good kisser and, when the chemistry is right, I’m a lot of fun in the sack. The thing that gets me is why none of these nor any other virtues and charms ever seem to do the trick when I really want them to. People swear up and down that I’m a great catch, but the positive reinforcement doesn’t come. Quite the contrary, in fact. I’m just the passing fancy, the second best, the good personality, and just the friend, if even that.
Maybe it’s shame more than low self-esteem. Though I can admit that I’ve got plenty of good stuff to offer, I also have to face up to being damaged goods. It’s easy enough to whine, “Wah, nobody loves me,” and blame it on fickle tastes and too much competition, but I’ve been on the other end of the equation enough to know it’s not that simple and sometimes feelings just don’t last. No, it’s the real stuff that upsets me the most: being positive, being prone to depression, getting so needy when it takes a hold of me, feeling the need to aggressively make things right when they go wrong, being too fast for the clean-cut guys yet too clean-cut for the fast guys. This is the stuff that makes me admit to myself now and then, in my smallest, neediest voice, “Why should anyone pick me when it would be so much easier not to bother?” And it’s so easy to listen to that little voice when I appear to screw things up the few times they really count.