To Be Empty: No Anchor, Floating With Cargo

TW: This was written in a deep depression.

The storage room at the coast is empty. The physical cargo has been moved to another city much farther north. The emotional cargo is weighing me down.

I had a lovely holiday with my daughter and grandchildren. I met (briefly) an acquaintance I have long admired. I am back in Blanche (an old AC/DC song rings in my head) and will be settled in a beloved location for some time to come. I have much to do to fix my life and get back to adulthood.

I want none of it.

I simply want to run out of meds and be done with it all.

I want to be empty.

I said here, “It will be challenging not to steer myself away from friendships and human caring as a whole, for I need the memory of the fragility of these things as well, lest I wander back into this Texas Gulf Coast realm.”

In other words, I will struggle not to retreat into myself. I am deeply ensconced in self-hatred and loneliness and the two are mutually destructive. If one hates the body and mind in which one exists, one becomes unwilling to offer either to a friend or lover. If I offer myself, the ensuing disappointment turns into more self-hatred.

When I left my ex, I was confident. I’d lost weight, felt good about myself in general, and was not digging into the pain of the past. I looked and felt younger than my years and found a surprising number of attractive, younger men showing interest. I wasn’t ready to date so I didn’t. I said then that I was too old to start over and too young to give up.

In a little over two years, I have reached too-old-to-start-over and ready-to-give-up. I’ve put on weight, a year of travel through my past has left me looking every bit of my fifty-eight years, and my encounters with those men and others along the way have assured me that I am destined for friendships, not love.

I struggled to let go of TWM because I couldn’t shake the way he looked at me and the kind words of appreciation for my form and smile. It seemed that he was the only man in the universe who would ever see me that way and for whom I felt similar feelings. I’m convinced that’s still true. I can’t imagine anyone seeing me that way again (not even him). Yet, I can’t imagine loving anyone without those feelings of attraction.

There are two things I need in a partner:

1. He must be secure in the relationship and not suffer jealousy or possessiveness. I will not tolerate jealousy or possessiveness in either him or me.
2. He must love me and want me. The whole person me. The woman who talks with her hands, wears her sunglasses on top of her head, wears blue, pink, green, or bright orange if she wants to, makes eye contact with other people when they talk to her, laughs too loud sometimes, retreats into herself sometimes and needs to be alone, is a Trump-hating progressive, judges the wealthy, has jowls, a wattle, and a “strong German nose,” and struggles to keep in shape because she loves bread and cookies and porter.

My ex used to say, “For every duck, there’s a duckette.” I took that to mean, “you are too plain to be loved by anyone but me, so you had best stay here.” I stayed until staying meant dying by my own hand. I don’t blame him entirely for my inability to see myself as anything but an ugly duckette, but I do blame him significantly. This same man regularly told me that men only looked at me for the “T&A”. Calling me “beautiful” as a term of endearment did nothing to counter the constant message that my value lay in who I was from the neck down.

I see no way out of this. Each day I get older, fatter, more wrinkled, and blander. I see only a few years remaining and those will be spent alone both romantically and in other ways because I struggle to communicate with loved ones who think I should just pop up out of the grave of the past and “be happy.”

This loneliness is too much to bear some days. It is bright and sunny today and will be for days and I simply want to hide.

If I could find a pill that would kill my desire to be held and touched, I would pay handsomely for it. There is no such pill, so I can only “empty myself/of [everything] through/my eyes,/my throat” and this keyboard, and hope that someday I will be empty enough not to care.

Last Updated on March 29, 2023 by Lee Ellis