Chapter 221, in which I beat myself up very, very thoroughly

I am really getting to be down on myself these days. Everything seems to be piling up at once... money things, house things, cat things, social things, work things, health things, and then stupid shit like spending nearly an hour this morning searching for my wallet and worrying that I'd lost and (and, since I have no cash in my bank account, since it was used to pay off bills) I would have been totally fucked.

So, I'm going to lay out all the stuff that's been getting to me, and maybe by writing to you all about it will make me rethink it all.

House stuff: my house is a frickin' mess. The cats trash everything. The carpets need to be cleaned. The furniture needs to be cleaned. Everywhere I look, I see things that have to painted. The bathroom needs to be redone some more. The bedroom ceiling wallpaper is shot. The trim all needs attention.

Cat stuff: the cats trash everything. A couple of them still haven't figured out how to get along. Worst, the oldest of them is now almost eleven years old, which means in a couple of years I'm going to start losing them, and it's going to be really, really painful for me.

Work stuff: I've been in coast mode for almost a year now, feeling like there's no new horizons to chase around work. Just maintaining everything, feeling like I've plateaued.

Health things: I am too big, and too tired, and my eating habits -- mostly my eating schedule -- are crazy. I tire easily, I feel dizzy sometimes, I have little weird pains and discomfort I don't like.

Money things: I live with a constant fear that somehow I've forgotten to pay something. I need to consolidate all these goofy little debts and get rid of them, but I keep doing everything piecemeal and I feel like I'm never catching up. My house is kind of expensive to run for just one person... it costs me around $2500 a month to deal with the mortgage, oil, electric, phones, cable, car insurance, all that.

Social things: as you can figure, if you've read here for a while, this overarches everything else. I constantly feel alone. I constantly wish I was with someone. Because of all the stuff above, I feel unworthy of anyone I'd really want to be with. I feel as though the idea of "leagues," and my being out of most of them, hovers over me waiting to smack me with its truth. I look at and think about the sort of women I've always wanted to be with -- the smart, attractive, vibrant women who know how to live their lives and who do interesting, intriguing things -- are out of my league. It's like high school all over again. The Alison Hopkinses of the world are still out of reach, even now that I'm 43 and adult and by most measures successful, just as they were when I was a poor, badly-dressed, awkward and socially-inept 17-year-old.

Nothing has changed, except the stakes seem higher and the longing more pungent.

What got me thinking about this was that I heard back, five months later, from a woman I'd contacted on one of the dating sites. She's a gorgeous 40-year-old brown-eyed blonde pianist in Manhattan who likes cats and whose words captivated me. She wrote to say that she hadn't checked her email in a couple of months because she'd been in a relationship, but that she admired my persistence and patience. She did tell me her name, though.

I Googled her, and found that she's an extremely well-respected musician, author, and professor at a major university. She's been all over the world, played everything, and comes from a well-regarded family in Manhattan.

I was depressed profoundly after I thought about it a while, because I thought, "what in the world do I have to offer a woman like that?" It's not that I could not live in a world such as she seems to, but that I am fairly sure that neither she nor anyone like her, anywhere, would be the sort who could move between those worlds and the other worlds I occupy.

I could not picture this woman in my house. Or my world. I could only picture myself leaving all the stuff I love behind and being a refugee for the sake of companionship in a world in which I'd never be comfortable or at home.

I talked with my friend Judy about this at lunch the other day. What I basically told her was that I felt like I wasn't worthy of the women I wanted, but that I didn't want the sort of women who seemed available to me.

"What, the fat, dumb and shallow ones?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"You have a lot to offer," she told me.

"Nothing that anyone seems to want, though. I've tried. What I offer, nobody seems to want, and what they want, I don't seem to have."

That's what I'm feeling like these days, folks. I feel like I will be alone the rest of my life because I can't just keep my mouth shut and accept that the only women who seem to be available to me are the sort that annoy me, stifle me, slow me down or make me disappointed. I can't seem to just shut up and accept it.

When I was 17, I was filled with the certainty that my aloneness came from being a strange bird in a small town, and that someday, someone would appreciate me in all my quirky splendor. A quarter-century later, I'm still waiting for her.