It's not you, it's me

We all have friends who don't know how to be alone. Or perhaps we were once like that ourselves. We all have stoned or drunken friends. Or perhaps we were once those friends. I was once both of these things – chronically coupled and perpetually stoned.

For years now, I've been stationed at the opposite end of the spectrum, and I've noticed that people who abstain from alcohol always blame the drinkers for running away from reality, just as those who remain single blame the eternally coupled. They're missing one important point, and this is that being so sober is also a form of escape, just like eternal singleness.

If we admit the truth, we're all running away to the same degree. Whatever extreme we choose, our skeletons in the closet will always be waiting for us. Causing us to cower in fear alone, causing us to cling together, causing us to carry on stubbornly in relationships and then disappear for a while.

Uncontrolled emotional floods

It's called 'spiritual fainting' and it's what happens to me when the emotional floods get the better of me. Every time I think that when the right person comes along it won't happen, but every time, it happens anew.

I detach from every positive feeling and I'm capable of looking at someone I love and not being able to understand why he's there. I can suffer a sudden attack of hatred, thinking the most horrible thoughts and wanting him to disappear from my life.

How do you explain to the person that you love that all of a sudden you feel nothing, and that this is only related to you? Communication fizzles, and then there's the blame, then the anger, more blame, and then more anger.

It's not new, but once upon at time at least I was able to falsely lay some of the blame on my significant others. Because, the truth is, they really weren't something.

Not one of them truly fit me, wasn't truly high quality, wasn't good for me, and not one of them stood a chance of having me really fall in love with them (and this I know only in retrospect, of course. At the time, I was completely swindled).

It's definitely me

This time, most regrettably, it's harder to do it. This time, there's no refuge in the ability to pass the blame. This time, even if I try, I can't hang this on him. Even as darkness descended on my brain, I knew for certain that this time it certainly wasn't him. It was me, and only me.

The problem is that there's no knowing, just like during a bad trip or a PMS rage attack, what is real and what is illusion. I can’t know if I love him and I'm just having a fleeting moment of crisis, or whether I imagined love and that the nothingness is actually the reality. It's true that it always passes and then I don't know what I was so excited about, but it always comes back and then I don't understand how I could ever have lived without it. A horrible loop.

We are all running away. The drug addicts and the eternally coupled, and also us, the sober and the eternally alone. The different is that we're running away and justifying it, simultaneously, and that's just gross.