I don’t have much in my life, but take it, it’s yours.
on youthful angst and feeling unloveable
Dear You,
I’ve said before that the one thing I would never get rid of was any of my old diaries/journals, or anything I’ve ever written, because I know several people who got rid of their old writings in a fit of ‘letting go of the past,’ and then later regretted it. Well, I’ve lived to eat my words.
See, I had not one, but two trunks (not to mention countless other bins and boxes) full of old journals, writings, and the like. A brown one which contained my journals and notebooks from 2001-2008:
And a blue one, which contained my journals, etc. from the mid-late ‘80s all the way up to 2000:
The blue trunk was caught in the basement flood at our last house, and I hadn’t opened it since. It turns out that the bottom 1/3 of its contents were basically destroyed (either growing mold or just all ink-smeared and stuck together), and even some of the other stuff was growing mold. There was also a bunch of rusty metal (good thing I got a tetanus booster the other day!) and silverfish in there. I found that after I threw away the stuff that was unsalvageable, it was pretty easy to get rid of a bunch of other stuff. I saved about 1/4 of the contents; another 1/4 I took pictures of before tossing; and the other 1/2 I just threw out. And I feel…free? Like, a lot of stuff in that trunk was related to some of the worst times in my life, and to paraphrase something I wrote in my last post (that time, re: throwing out a pin from an abusive ex’s zine): It’s not like I’ll ever forget them, and if I did—would that really be so bad?
But this post isn’t really about that. It’s about some of the journals I found in that trunk, which I flipped through before throwing out, and their contents.
In a large portion of my journal entries from third grade on, I was obsessing about some boy or other that I was “in love with” and how he was “The One” and “does he like me back?” Starting in sixth grade, after I realized I was bi, girls came into the mix, but the emotional tenor was basically the same: “I love her, I love him, they’re The One, do they like me? I guess.” (To cop a phrase from Fugazi.) Even when romantic (and later, sexual) feelings weren’t part of it, I could often be found obsessing about platonic friendships; I’d meet someone new and write about how I was so sure we were destined to be, in modern parlance, besties—or, to quote Anne of Green Gables (another childhood obsession of mine)—“bosom friends.”
What struck me about these entries wasn’t just the constant crushes and friend-crushes—those are pretty common for kids and teens—but the intensity of them. I couldn’t just have a casual crush, no, this new boy or girl had to be my soulmate. I couldn’t just enjoy hanging out with a new friend, no—they had to be my best friend. (Like, I would have 1000% been Anne in the film still I posted above, the one making a new friend vow their eternal friendship to me.) And if someone didn’t reciprocate, I thought I would die, or at least never love again—until the next week, when someone else came along, and I convinced myself that this time was the real thing.
I suppose those feelings are fairly common, too, especially in adolescence. Everything’s still relatively new, and it’s easy to think that every new crush or person you date is The One, and every breakup or brushoff is the end of the world. Not only that, but it’s easy to think that no one else has ever felt exactly this way before, and that no one else will ever understand how you feel.
But I do believe that I may have felt things more intensely than your average (pre)teen; or at least…expressed them more intensely. There were some journal entries about particular people that were so unsettlingly intense that I’m glad those people never came across them. And in some cases, they did come across them, because I also found a few copies of love letters I wrote, as well as printouts from my online diaries. (I had an online diary on my website starting around 1995, even before Diaryland and LiveJournal were a thing; and even though I gave people nicknames, it was not difficult to figure out who I was talking about.) And some of it was beyond cringe, it was fucking creepy.1 Not threatening, just…fucking yikes, dude.
Aside from the crushes and their intensity, what I also found was my deep conviction that I was completely, totally, and eternally unloveable. That I was undesirable (both as a friend and as a romantic or sexual partner); that there was something so wrong with me that anyone who got too close to me would smell it and run away screaming. I’m not going to get into the why of it here (blah blah childhood trauma; blah blah fucked-up brain chemistry; etc.), but oof.
It was like being punched in the gut with my lifelong issues, and I had a bunch of realizations about myself and some long-ago friendships, relationships, situationships, and crushes. So often, back then, I thought of myself as the victim. I had this whole “I’m unloveable, wait maybe this person will really Understand Me, oh it didn’t work out? I was right, I’m unloveable” mindset, which made it so that I never worked on my own issues, I just repeated that cycle over again with the next one. This isn’t to say that no one I was friends with, or had a crush on, or dated, ever did anything shitty to me—many of them did. But I can see so clearly, now, the ways in which I also hurt people.
For one, I scared people away with my intensity. Generally, I’m of the mindset that if someone can’t hang with my passionate intensity, then good riddance, but as I said above, some of it was fucking creepy, and there’s a huge difference between, say, someone making fun of me because I waxed poetic about the sunset, or gave names to the seagulls that hung around the library downtown (both things which did actually happen), and someone being upset to find a thinly-veiled journal entry about a conversation we had in private and how much I looooved them on a website that the whole town could potentially read2, or to receive a letter of which the gist is “if you don’t love me back, I’ll die.”34
For another, even if someone did reciprocate some of my platonic or romantic feelings, I usually found some way to drive them away. I’d constantly pester people—not because they’d done or said anything wrong, simply because they hadn’t responded to something I’d said in the way I wanted; or because I hadn’t heard from them for a day or two—with things like: “You’re mad at me, aren’t you? You secretly hate me, don’t you?!” Or I just put them on a pedestal, created some Ideal of Them in my head that no one could possibly live up to, because they were fucking human, and I’ve been on the other side of that, and it sucks. And if I didn’t drive them away, I just plain left. I was so convinced of my essential unloveableness and I just knew if my friend or date-mate hadn’t figured it out yet, they would soon—so I’d break things off, or ghost them, before they could leave me.
Finally, and this one may be the worst of all—I could be downright cruel to people who liked me, romantically or platonically, if they weren’t someone whom I was currently obsessed with trying to befriend or date.5
Mostly, I just wish I could talk to my younger self, and tell them: “You need to stop being shitty to the people who genuinely care about you, and you need to stop being shitty to yourself. You need to learn the difference between people who are worthy of your adoration, and those who are mediocre assholes whom you’ve built up into demigods in your mind. You’re not uniquely unloveable. You’ll eventually find your people, and though you’ll still have moments where you’ll feel out of place and alone, those will become fewer and farther between, and you’ll realize that some of that is just your own fucked-up brain talking shit. You’ll also always feel everything very intensely, but you’ll mostly learn how to deal with it in healthier ways, and to use it to fuel your art. Which is really what it should have been about all along.”
I’ll end this with the Smiths song from which I got the title of this post6:
P.S. I’ve still got my GoFundMe going, and any amount could really help with the rest of our moving costs, as well as help us settle into our new place until me and my partner get new jobby-jobs. I’ve also decided to keep my Ko-fi open, so if you wanna order something, go for it—just know that if it’s non-digital, I won’t be able to send it out until probably mid-July. (Or, you could become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. I have a paid subscribers-only post ready to go for later this month, and I’m pretty excited about it.)
I think the whole concept of “cringe,” in the sense of shaming people for being themselves and/or generally expressing their wants and needs and interests, needs to die—but that is not what I’m talking about, here.
I also generally agree with that Anne Lamott quote: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” But, again, that is not what I’m talking about here.
No, I never actually threatened suicide or anything like that, I just mean I phrased my feelings with that type of intensity.
I don’t know how I didn’t see how awful I was being; I had been on the other side of similar situations, even back then, and knew how much they sucked. I guess I just couldn’t see that I was doing the same thing.
And a brief fourth thing: some of the people I liked who did actually do or say genuinely shitty things to me—I see now that they were just doing basically the same thing to me that I did to them, or to other people. We were all so fucked up.
The tl;dr version of this post would just say: “I was the type of teen who related deeply to Smiths songs,” lol.