More negativity

Aaaagh… Why? Why?! Why did I go and do that tonight?

I’m more temperamental than I’d like to admit.

I like to get things done my way, so I do it all myself; my bad moods affect people close to me, so I’m totally comfortable being distant and unemotional; I’d be very hostile when my mood is interrupted, so I like to keep to myself.

“Most people don’t know this, but I don’t have much of an inner calm. I actually have this consistent outer calm that tends to ripple every now and then in accordance with my roiling inner lack of calm.”

Most people with whom I have developed very close relationships have some level of understanding of why I don’t fall all over everybody with sticky-sweet, gooey love and affection. Once I’m a friend, I’ll stay a friend regardless of how long it’s been since we last interacted. I’m not a high-maintenance friend; my friendship requires minimal upkeep. I really like my space, and I like to respect everyone else’s.


So I’m a little distant and, to the less-than-patient people, I’m an apathetic loner. I promise I’m not. I know and love enough people to die happy and fulfilled (not that I’d want to die anytime soon), and I know there’s very little I would refuse them. And there’s the preface.

Now, facebook is fun to play with. Since I’m also highly sentimental, I like to flip through the pages of my messages to see what I’ve been up to within the past year. It’s a past-self/present-self interaction. It helps me stay outer-calmed.

It’s therapy.

But tonight was a bit of a different story. After weeks and weeks of artist’s block, a couple nights of pent-up annoyance at numerous things, and an hour or so of “tidying up” my already tidy room, I flip through about the 28th page of my old messages. You just have to tweak the numbers in the address bar to jump to a ridiculous numbered page.

One name stood out.

Recently, I’ve taken to using his name in casual conversation without flinching, and I’d even gotten all fifteen pages of his birthday comic out in a public gallery for the whole world to see (well, all of dA, anyway). It used to sink me into an immovable depression to even think of him, but something new definitely came out of the emotive folds when I committed the cardinal ex-boyfriend sin, the ultimate transgression of self-dignity; I reread the old messages.

MAN, it makes me sick to even think about being in love again. All that mushiness, all that sacrifice, all that understanding… it makes my stomach churn. It’s a real blow to my pride to think of all the things I would have been ready to give up at the drop of a hat because I thought he’d like it that way. It also didn’t help that I was terrified of his parents at the time because, for some inexcusably stupid reason, their opinion of me mattered. I actually allowed someone else to have an opinion about me. That’s how bad it was.

Now, though, there wasn’t even so much as an annoying twinge of sadness or despondency.

Now I’m just enraged.

I want to find him and bash his face in with my foot. Repeatedly. Ruthlessly. Rhythmically (you know, so I can expend all my anger and frustration in even, measured spurts for the benefit of my own little neurotic tendencies).

I kept thinking to myself, “He witnessed it… it witnessed me at my lowest, most pathetic altruistic self. I want there to be no witnesses.”

I sound like the premise of a CSI episode.

I do recognize, though, that beyond my long-constrained inner rage, there was a time when I would feel ok if the world as I knew it faded out of my memory as long as someone special to me remained the constant. Admitting it is humiliation.

And I’d give almost anything to be able to feel that strongly again.