The Lonely Heart is a Hunter

I’ve been having trouble writing the last couple of days. Not because my mind wasn’t filled with words but because I did not think the words would be pleasing to whoever reads this blog. My mission when I started writing this blog was to be fearlessly honest and look, I’m already back-sliding into people-pleasing.  Then I received a message from a long-ago high school friend who encouraged me to write from my heart and not take the readers into consideration. She’s right and I thank her for the words.

You all know by now that I suffer from bi-polar whatever (is it a disease?  A condition? A curse from hell?) And I can give both myself and my friends whip-lash by how fast I can plunge from happiness to miserable. It’s almost a magic trick. It almost never fails to catch me off-guard. 

I’ve been thinking this morning that I might know a little about why people commit suicide. Not that I would. I’m too afraid of sharp objects and tall buildings, but I might have a tiny insight into the emotional condition that prompts such a desperate move.

First of all, depression not only makes you sad, it makes you feel hopeless. And alone. And unlovable. It’s a mind-fucker, for sure. It also convinces you that you will ALWAYS feel this way. You forget that just yesterday you were smiling, laughing and planning a new theater company. 

Last night as I was flipping through my glossy Oprah magazine wondering on what planet $200 jeans are considered “budget finds” when I found myself gazing at an ad for diamonds. I do not wear jewelry or like fancy do-dads but diamonds are my thing. I love them. Maybe because they are beautiful little darlings or maybe because of what they symbolize. To me, they symbolize that someone chose me. Out of the billions of people on the planet, I was singled out and chosen. They liked it, so they put a ring on it.

I remember feeling the same way about St. Christopher medals. Remember all ye old folks? That was what boys gave girls to “go steady” in elementary school back when God was a boy. 

I got one once from a boy. His name was Dan. It was orange and ugly and not as pretty as the white one I had secretly bought for myself, but it instantly made me loveable. Someone chose me to go steady with. For a day. The next day as I was showing it off to all my friends on the playground he marched up and demanded it back. Apparently this was to be a “secret” 6^th grade love affair and he just hadn’t told me. The humiliation was pretty extreme. I went from popular to leper in a mere 20 seconds.

In High School I went through a similar scenario but by this time I had learned to keep my good fortune of being chosen to myself so as not to embarrass the boy who liked me. We drove to school every day together and he would hold my hand until we hit campus. Then he dropped it. By the second week I would drop my hand from his so as not to feel the extreme rejection. He told me later he felt like a bastard for doing it because he really did like me. But he was a “Soch”, president of the Statesmen and a good looking guy and I was a drama nerd, an outcast. He was afraid of what his friends would say.

He eventually got up the courage to take my hand back once I pulled it away, symbolizing his courage under scrutiny. I was happy and we stayed together through that year and into college. Happy ending, right?

I never forgot what he’d done. I never forgave. I started to hate him. And eventually I broke his heart.

He had proven to me what I already knew, that I was somehow “less than” others. That it took a great leap of courage, not to mention humanity, for him to deign to date me. To love me. Me. The leper.

So, back to the ring ad. It’s not like I’ve never gotten an engagement ring, heck I’ve had four. (One of them ended up being too crazy for even me to marry.) So I can get men to marry me. This was an ad for an anniversary diamond collection. “Tell her you’d marry her all over again” kind of thing. I think the word that sprung my water works was “cherish.”

I know some husbands who seem to cherish their wives. Their children.  The thesaurus says that to cherish is to “treasure, value, prize, appreciate, esteem and take pleasure in.” I’ve never felt that. Have you?

I made my mother cry once. No, I didn’t hit her, or wear the wrong color to the prom. I asked her several years ago, about two years into recovery when I was delving into my fearless and personal inventory, if she had a clue as to why I was so independent and so fucking needy all at the same time. It made her cry. She told me that no one bothered with me the first two years of my life. Yup. Those years we now know to be the most important in creating self-love. She told me my sister, who is two years older than me, was very ill when I was born and then her mother began dying of cancer. So for about two years they fed me, played with me for about five minutes and put me in a crib. Alone. 

In “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller she talks about “narcissistic deprivation.” This is when parents are too busy to mirror for a child their own lovability. It happens in the first two years of life. When a baby looks into their parent’s face they see their self-esteem mirrored back. If the parent’s look is one of love, of joy then a child feels treasured, admired, wanted. A baby thinks “now, I am the bomb!” 

What happens when a baby doesn’t get that look? Instead gets a look of annoyance, as though it’s cry to be feed and changed is just a little too needy? You get me. A person who spends their life trying to find that look in others. In shiny objects. In diamonds.

That is no way to live. That is a deep and endless hole.

But as the song goes “I’m tired of living and scared of dying.” So I’m here. 

Thank God I have a cat.