You read the title right. The last time I was intimate with a woman, the Twin Towers were still standing.
What brought this to be was not an immediate, conscious decision. It happened because of two things, both related.
My undiagnosed mental illness had me on shaky ground. I was erratic, moody and very insecure. It had been that way every time I was in a relationship.
Then there was jealousy over imagined things…insecurities and low self esteem made me convinced that no woman would ever be happy with me. I just couldn’t believe it. Invariably I would begin to question. That would turn into accusations. I hurt the one I loved, I confused and frustrated them to the point where they had no choice but to walk away.
I have loved many times in my life. Being abused and made to have sex at a preadolescent age changed my development and my perception of love and sexuality. At an early age I felt unloved and lonely in a house with four sisters and three brothers. I so wanted to have a girlfriend and be loved and yet had no belief that any girl could love a piece of shit like me. So when I did fall in love, I was too afraid to voice it. In Lee Ann’s case I thought of her as someone I was not only not good enough for but also as a special girl destined for a life of happiness that I would never be able to provide. She was the first girl I had too much respect for to take the chance of hurting. I left her alone.
That was when I was in third grade. I’ve never stopped loving her. I’ve never stopped loving anyone I ever loved. I don’t have that capability and it has caused me a lot of pain but I carry that pain gratefully. I have a heart. At least I can say that.
But that doesn’t mean I’m okay to be in a relationship. In fact my last one made me lose good friends. She got hold of their numbers and, never even having met them, called and badgered them as to where I was whenever I wasn’t with her. My friends stopped taking my calls.
I finally ended it. I moved to another town. She found out where and changed my address in order to intercept my mail. Why, I don’t know. I had to make a police report and another for the Postal Service. She did other things which constituted stalking, and that wasn’t my first time with a stalker. Wasn’t the last, either.
I was a low shooter. I picked girls who were dysfunctional or less than what I wanted and if you’ve ever done that due to your level of self esteem then you know I’m being truthful here. It’s really a thing.
And it means you need help. Low self esteem will lead you to a dead end where all of your dreams die. Where you talk trash about yourself in front of friends who are hurt to hear your words. A dead end that has all the opportunities for drug and alcohol abuse, even suicide.
The decision to go celibate sounds really hard. It isn’t at a certain point. I realized that I was never going to be able to have a normal relationship with any woman. I was saddened by the revelation but it was the truth. And sex with no love is not a thing I ever enjoyed because of my desperation to be loved. I wanted the whole package or nothing. I chose the nothing.
I’m not counting self pleasure; that’s not covered by my interpretation of being celibate despite the technical definition. For me, it means to surrender a part of your life for your own protection, whether that be mental, physical or emotional.
Some consider what I chose a sacrifice. I don’t. I’m proud of it. To be getting emotionally involved with someone who you’re never going to truly be happy with is wrong. Wrong for you and wrong for the other person.
For the past few years I was involved with someone I met on Facebook. We had lots of hours of conversations on chat, phone and video. I came to genuinely love she and her family. I still do, but I’ve known for some time that it was impossible for us to meet in person. I knew all along that even if we did, she would never have been happy with me.
I knew because of several things but the other day I had to break all contact. I had dreadfully overreacted to something she wrote in a comment. I took it to heart when she called me a name which, had anyone else done, would have been funny. A year ago it would even have been funny coming from her.
I didn’t think it was funny and it hurt me. She responded in such a way that it made me break all chances of contact. Except then she left a voicemail that made me not regret it at all.
She threw things in my face. She had been there for me.
She left out things I’d done for her, and of course that was because she was angry. She missed every sign that I’ve gotten worse; she’s had a lot going on lately and my deteriorating mental condition – severe depression, anxiety and sensitivity, along with noticeable changes in sleep patterns are easy to tick off in a sentence but have been hell to live with. I spend days borderline suicidal. I’ve not known such a deep and extended period of depression in years, my nightmares are enough to make me question my sanity, and I feel terrible pain from some back injury that I believe happened just because of aging. I’m sorry I severed ties. I know it hurt her.
But it is much better to hurt someone once than to maintain a relationship that will keep causing pain. I’m simply getting worse.
Moreover I’m getting my house in order. I didn’t even notice I was doing it at first. It’s some kind of need that I can only think of one cause for.
While I did such a shitty thing to someone I loved, my level of caring about others has increased. It’s my nature to love even people who seem to hate me. It’s my nature to hurt for people I know even on social media. If I put a sad emoji up, it’s because it’s how I feel. Sometimes I’ll tell someone how sorry I am, and I mean it. I never say how deeply I’m sorry or feeling their pain. Or most of all how worried I am.
COVID-19 didn’t just make me sick. It changed my whole world. I have had long lasting damage from it, mostly with memory and that’s mostly forgetting people. But I noticed behavioural changes as well. My southern accent usually is well hidden. I used to slip into it only when very tired or very nervous. Now it changes and kicks in all the time and I hate it. I feel as if I’m going to sound as if I have multiple personalities. If I did, they’d all be assholes. Just saying.
I hear shit wrong too. The Terminix commercial where the deck falls with a couple on it has a guy with a British accent step into the foreground and say something but it sounds like “Don’t get caught sucking your dick…” and the rest is indiscernible.
Everything is just fucking wrong. It is a given that my physical pain isn’t helping. I know when I’m seen for it I’ll be sent for X-rays then a CT then an MRI. They want money. The MRI is what I need. But I need relief and treatment too. Simple tasks can send me into a pain level that brings me close to tears, and pain is something I have become used to. Not like this, though.
With all of this going on, I’m not even fit company for a phone call. Against my nature I’ll be thinking about myself, preoccupied and distracted, and I do believe it will get worse, as it has been for months.
That said, I can’t live like this. I want to help people. To cheer them up and tell them they’re treasure to me. My next door neighbor, a widow, hasn’t been handling her grief and anxiety well. I love her dearly. I told her that today. I said that to me she’s treasure. That I hurt too, seeing her suffer. That I’m here for whatever I can help her with.
That’s what I want to tell everyone I love.
But my life has never gone the way I wanted it to. These memoirs, they’re full of things some find too disturbing to read. Some posts are, to some, too outrageous. The paranormal stuff, mostly. But it all really happened and at times there were witnesses.
Therefore I have not always gotten to be or do what I wanted. When my parents killed my dreams and turned them into a preoccupation with sex, making what should have been dreams of becoming someone who mattered into sexual fantasies, the day came when all I had left was the hope and desire to just be a decent man. To overcome their racist beliefs, their example of control and manipulation and to treat everyone in a kind manner.
I couldn’t even have that. My PTSD and other forms of mental illness keep me from being anything. I just exist. I take up space and waste it.
Behind me, online and in real life, lie the dead. My children, friends I had as a kid, family. There also are uncountable closed doors and burned bridges. I can’t undo any of it.
I ran away from people who were getting too close. I didn’t want to be hurt anymore. Some ran from me. I drove them to it. I drew a line. A circle around myself in the sand. Nobody gets inside it. I no longer make women turn their heads. I make them cross the street to avoid me.
I’ve become my own prisoner in my own circle of hell. I have no hope more often than I have it. I am alone, as I always knew I was fated to be. It was part choice and part instinctive self defense.
No more pain. I felt too much. I cared too much. I loved too much and love always got me hurt. I became a coward.
I wish things had been different. That the bad things would go away and let me live, really live.
Yet I find, on this night after a day that saw George Floyd’s killer convicted, that I’m ashamed. Seeing his family’s pain, I empathized because I know loss. I have cried for people I never met. I always will because after all, I can’t really stop loving and caring.
To readers abroad, as always, I’m grateful you’re here. I can’t imagine what you think of the United States but perhaps you’re confused. I’m confused and I live here. It should not make the news, the horrible things that you’ve been seeing. The shame of the Trump presidency will never go away. Killers roam our streets, mass killings are more common than you can know, cops killing people of color are monsters with badges and no consciences and we are less to you than we wish we were. For so long, especially after World War Two, we had a national pride that I believe hurt us. We thought we were so great.
Now we’re pulling the last of our troops out of Afghanistan and perhaps there aren’t so many of them as to make a difference but in the minds of extremists it will be a great victory. They will immediately begin to engage in heinous acts, mostly against women. Our presence there has had an influence on culture and politics. Leaving will destabilize all power of the government and anyone who had extended contact with us will curse us. It is a mistake to leave now when our mission was not accomplished. It is dishonorable to leave, knowing what girls and women will go through. All we accomplished will be reversed and it will be worse than before we went there.
It is a betrayal in my mind. I don’t like war, but to bug out is to do the same as we did to the Kurds. It dishonors us and leaves people to be tortured and to die.
We’re in a national mess, and President Biden wants to do things to clean up that mess. I’m sure his decision was hard for him and yet I strongly disagree with it.
Meanwhile Republicans are against him no matter what he wants to do. He’s a good man with a big heart. He called George Floyd’s family today. A president who cares, and is honest, is special. More so after the debasement of America by Donald Trump. Russia knows now is the time to test Biden and is massing armor and infantry on the Ukraine border. This follows harsh lessons Biden tried to teach Putin, a man notorious for not learning anything except new ways to attempt world supremacy for Russia. He loves to test, probe and corrupt. Whoever follows him will very likely be even worse.
The Janssen (Johnson and Johnson) vaccine was ordered stopped being administered last week, but here in Maryland one corporate entity producing the vaccine had some kind of incident and that made it worse. Anti Vaxxers just got handed unlimited ammo to convince others not to be vaccinated which, down the road, will cause death.
In all of this, and more, I feel stupid bragging about 20 years of celibacy. As if the world turns around me and anyone cares.
But it was necessary and I’m kind of proud of myself for it. Perhaps I’ve caused less misery than I otherwise would have.
But I still cause pain, no matter how hard I wish I had no power to do so. I can’t be the simple, decent guy I wanted to be. I can’t even manage that. I won’t cop out and blame mental illness.
Because there’s just more proof that I’m an asshole.
Memoirs of an American Christian 