I booked some work, and I cancelled. So, technically I still haven’t gone back to work yet.

I have an interview today, with another job. I’ll be taking a break from writing this to go get on that call. <=== the call was rescheduled for a few hours later, so I guess I have time to write now.

I scheduled myself some work 2 days from now, and so I guess it’s inevitable. It should be. I have bills to pay and goals to reach. I should be happy that it’s so easy. There’s a lot of people out there that wish money were so easy to come by, and to be honest for a long time in my life I have been one of those people.

I feel guilty that I cancelled work. There have been times where I have been so desperate for that money, to turn it down for no reason other than an amorphous existential crisis feels like a betrayal to my younger, broke self. And I don’t feel wrong about feeling that way.

Especially since all I ended up doing anyway was sleeping.

Not sleeping really, but hiding. Hiding from my boyfriend. I don’t know why. It’s my house, I could just get up, kiss him good morning, sit down at my computer, and continue on with my life around him, like I tell myself every time he’s on his way up that I am going to do. I tell myself that I’m not going to lose myself in his presence, I’m going to maintain my quality of life, do my morning exercises, wash off my makeup before bed, and not let him knock me completely off my stride like he has every single time that he’s come around for the last 4 years. I can’t even complain it’s his fault.

I mentioned it before (and remind myself that I don’t have to make this make sense to anyone but myself) but when I’m with him I feel like I’m working. I feel like I have to put on a show for him, a show I do actually enjoy watching myself perform, but a show nonetheless. It’s not me. I don’t feel like me. And I desperately try to feel like me by telling him about my life, everything I’m feeling, all of my plans, and basically just overburdening the relationship, but somewhere in between all of my words and even in my own head recounting everything that’s happened to me, *I* can’t come across clearly. He feels like one of my clients, digging into various facets of my life to try and discover the “real” me, and utterly missing the point. Only he’s not the one digging, I am.

Unlike most of my clients, I don’t think he actually cares. I think he’s shallow to the point of thinking that other people are too. I probably just tell myself that to make myself feel better about the fact that he thinks my feelings are completely ridiculous, and better about the fact that yes, they actually are.

Unlike most of my clients. I feel like they’d understand me better, that they’d care, if only they could know me, which they can’t. It’s a safety net I’ve put up to protect myself against the perceived truth that I am completely unknowable (I think we all are) and that honestly, no one really has the capacity to care, though we all lie to ourselves and say that we’re trying to.

After all, do I really care about him?

To be honest, I don’t. I have tried to go through the actions of caring, to perform the acts of love, but I don’t feel it so much as I want to convince him, and myself, that I actually have the capacity to care. I want to convince him, to prove that my acting skills are top notch (I think, and have been told that, they are). I think I’ve reached the point where the act is as deep as it can go, and it’s just not deep enough. Maybe deep enough to fool him (but I doubt it, hence his reticence to move forward), but not deep enough to fool me.

Hence the “affairs”. More men that I can convince, outside of work, that I care about them and understand them. I went to sleep last night (barely) and woke up this morning, thinking about how petty all of that is. Why am I complicating strangers’ lives for my own emotional charade? It’s cruel. If it even is, I doubt they give a rat’s ass about me at the end of the day, though maybe they’d like to, just as I’d like to.

I didn’t feel this way about my ex. I don’t know why. Or maybe I did, thinking about it. I almost said that that’s why I started working at all, but I know that’s not true. I got myself into this because a deep dissatisfaction for who I was, and a desire to try to be someone else, someone I did like. Because I can’t stand feeling helpless and vulnerable and having anyone actually know me. He did, and while there were many things about me that he did not like at all (the same can be so thoroughly shouted), he liked me. There were so many things that I hated about him, but there were things that I liked to. Unfortunately, one of the things that I hated was the way he treated me. He’s shouted the same thing at me on many occasions.

I wonder if I’ll ever have a day where I don’t think about him.