Up Past My Bedtime
I downloaded Hinge a little bit ago and I have consistently been messaging the same guy. This past week, my anxiety started to spike because I could intuit that he was going to ask to hang out. It is the natural progression of these things - and it makes me feel terrified. I opened the app yesterday and there it was: him asking me out. All the blood in my body felt as if it dropped into my heels and the air squeezed from my lungs. I ignored the message for a bit - watched a podcast and drew in my travel journal. Then I took Tina for a walk in the dark. And on the walk, I decided that I wasn’t going to follow my knee jerk reaction to ghost him. And I also wasn’t about to plan a time to go out with him. Instead, I was just going to try to be honest and communicate that I wasn’t ready to meet yet.
In reality, I just messaged him tonight and said “I would like to hangout! But this month is wildly busy.” So a white lie. I don’t know what the right thing to do is - for me. I don’t owe him anything but human decency. And I do owe it to myself to go slow in an effort to not be completely overwhelmed. Baby steps. I have a headache and feel tired of myself.
Last night, I went to bed and cried because these circles that I go in have me exhausted. Often, I feel like I’m running head first into a brick wall and trying to change something that will never change. I look at other people who have experienced significant trauma early on in life and they are permanently changed - their baseline will never be the typical one. There is an MMA fighter with complex trauma and he was talking about his genuine desire to kill someone - and how it results from his trauma. Or I think about all the people who are lifelong drug addicts because of what they endured as children. And it has me wondering if this is my lifelong “thing,” the inability to be with anyone. It is hard to believe that I could endure the rape and neglect and abuse I did and still lead a normal life - and so maybe this is my plague. This is what is unfixable about me. It feels like I have been in therapy for years and years and years and I always end up in the same place when it comes to dating - unable.
I will press on the gas and go for what I want, but as soon as it becomes a remote possibility, I slam on the breaks. My headache tonight is from whiplash. I want what I do not have and I am also terrified of it. These two extremes are fighting within me and it feels like split selves. I am tired, and honestly, I am sad. When I get this overwhelm, when I feel this defeated and like I was robbed of normalcy, that voice comes back - the one that asks me: what is the point of all this?
I tend to isolate myself in these situations. Most of my friends at home do not know that I want to date or that I’m even attempting to. Honestly, the fear of telling my best friend that I have downloaded a dating app is greater than actually going on a date. It feels significantly more insurmountable.
There is a cork in my throat, a brick wall in my chest that stops me from communicating I want to date. This inability to verbalize my desires is really only present when I’m in Minnesota. I have friends all over the country who know that I want to date and want to grow past my inability to be with a guy. I still feel like my high school, middle school self when I’m here. I used to believe that anytime a guy had a crush on me, it was because his friends had dared him to see how far he could get with me. I used to believe (and still do obviously) that no one could like me - and to express interest in someone liking me was to set myself up to get torn apart and ridiculed.
I fear looking desperate. I fear someone thinking who is going to tell her no one would ever want to date her? On this dating app, I feel like a child who has stayed up past her bedtime during a party, and she’s hoping none of the grown-ups catch her and say: go to bed, this party is not for you, it is only for us. I look to everyone else in their relationships and intimacy with the craving of a child looking to the world of adults: feeling that everything worthwhile is right there, just on the other side of an unscalable wall.