I woke up late today, and I know why.

I have to stop hiding, from myself and everything.

This is my life, as I have built it, and I should be proud of it, not afraid of it.

My friend was right. It’s time to either do this or not. This applies to several aspects of my life. My fear leads to procrastination, which leads to sloppy, hasty work, which leads to a life that I want to hide from.

I have to stop.

I also have to stop smoking… it’s hard. I should throw out the last half pack of cigarettes. I’m not going to. I should save them for the next time the side dude comes over… but when will that be? I have to limit my exposure to people, for my parents’ sake. I know he hasn’t been.

I did dream last night, and was sure I’d remember parts of things to write down here, but everything fell apart when I was making coffee.

I want to talk about my work, but at the same time I want to save just a little bit of my anonymity here. General complaints, emotions, my life’s trials and my life’s blood – all those are surprisingly ordinary, plain, and nondescript. My work, hopefully, is none of those things. I should embrace it, and let it be on my mind again, instead of chasing it out of here to make room for god knows what all this mess is.

He already texted back… I don’t want to talk with him, I do believe that he’s a good part of the reason that I left my job altogether (thank you Corona Virus for giving me another excuse to hide behind). It’s not so much him as it is everything that he represents here.

Men getting too close.

Men who have the audacity to think that they know me, when they don’t know me. It’s insulting. It’s an insulting kind of compliment.

You don’t love me, you just love the way I suck your cock.

And fuck you if you think that’s a solid foundation for love. As if my mattress skills are a fucking personality trait. As if my ability to fake an orgasm in 30 seconds of erratic physical activity that only in pure technicality counts as sex is a quality that you’d look for in a person to trust with your life.

On some level, I understand what they see in me. I am, if I dare say so and I do, very beautiful, now that I allow myself to see it. You, ad clicker, probably are too, if you’d only allow yourself to see it.

I should have seen this coming… you’re way too pretty to be doing this.

Me to the cop who arrested me

However, I do not love Rembrandt, I do not love Gauguin, I do not love Caravaggio though all those paintings are beautiful. They are haunting, they capture something of life that I wish I had and know that I actually do. I do not love Rilke, I do not love Camus, I do not love Neil Gaiman (though at one point, I was determined to try) even though what they’ve chosen to share of themselves reveals a passion, craft, and soul that is undeniably admirable.

I do love my friends, but not like that. They occupy much of my mind space, I’m drawn in to the intricacies of their personalities and entrapped in the puzzle of how they balance ambition and achievement inside of everything that they are around that, and what life constantly throws in the mix with them. This world is a rock tumbler, and we come out as polished gems… some rougher than others, still smoothing over time, sometimes cut by expert jewelers and sometimes cracked by falls. It’s beautiful.

But even this is not nearly the level of love that these men profess for me, and that is so insulting.

What could love possibly be to you, if you think that you have any for me? That is not love, that is trash.

This is why I think monogamy is such bullshit. While I do believe that so much of who we are can be shared physically, and I do love exploring people this way, to think that sex is the foundation of love, in the technical sense, is insulting to both sex and love, two things that I hold sacred.

I absolutely abhor men with sexual hangups about monogamy, or sex generally. If you need monogamy, it means that you don’t trust my dedication to our relationship to know that I *will* come back to you, because I love you. How can two people think that they are enough for each other to keep the entire outside world away from each other? Dude, if you’re one dude, and the world has so many others, you have to at least objectively see that you’re massively outnumbered. You’re obviously going to lose, in a fair fight between you and every.fucking.one.else.

If a man insists on monogamy, it shows that I can’t trust them. I do not want to be charged with that impossible task of keeping a man to myself. That is so much work, I don’t know why women even want that. A man’s desire for monogamy shows that he has placed his basis for life planning and personal fulfillment on the physical, and that he is shallow, or believes that I am, which is so much worse.

It’s insulting. Unnecessarily insulting.

If I say I love you, I want you to believe it. I don’t want to have to lie and say I love you in order to fuck you. You don’t have to lie and say that you love me in order to fuck me. You don’t have to lie to *yourself* and say that you love me in order to fuck me.

But the fact that you would… that’s some damning praise, asshole. I want no part of that.

My current emo-based boyfriend is one of those assholes who believes that fucking is different than “making love”. There’s a distinct swirl in my stomach when I even think of that. Yes, sex with him got substantially better once we began a “relationship”, but that’s all that got better, that and I was able to give him my name for plane tickets and vacation reservations. That’s about trust, just enough trust to know that he values my physical pleasure enough to want to understand and incorporate it in our sexual activities, and enough trust to know that he’s not going to screw me over by opening loans in my name or fucking with my professional life after learning who I really am. Love? Hardly.

If you’re not a good enough person to give that level of respect to every stranger you find yourself in bed with, then get the fuck away from me you trash human being.

That is not love. What is?

I did, and still do, love my ex. I know that. I do not like him, that’s the unfortunate part. I don’t like him at all.

The opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is indifference

Dale Carnegie – I tried to go back and get the citation so I didn’t accidentally plagiarize, but found this instead which is cooler.

This man who says he loves me already texted me back, I’m not responding until I’m done with all of my coffee. It’s already cold. I want to speak with him, at least my life as I’ve planned it wants me to speak with him.

It’s in that last statement that I realize, realized as I left for medical leave, and have actually known for so long, that *I* am not *my life as I’ve planned it*.

That is a big problem.

My coffee mug is cold, and empty.