I’m shallower than I think I am. I’m deeper than you want me to be.
A dear friend of mine recently told me to loosen up. “Stop thinking the world’s out to get you,” he said over late-night cookies. “Try letting yourself open up a little and maybe you won’t be so lonely all the time.”
He’s right, of course. Dear friends usually are; it’s a large part of why we hold them so dear.
I don’t trust people. (Which is weird now that I think about it, given all of the information I throw up free for the taking all over the Internet.) It’s no big secret that I don’t date. It’s not really a conscious decision, I’m just a toxic mix of incredibly undateable (or so it seems) and violently self-depreciating. I don’t really like small-talk, and I can only assume (because I haven’t done it enough to say conclusively) that spewing out the same bullshit biographical information during a series of failed first-dates is exhausting.
But what carries more weight in this situation isn’t that I don’t trust other people, it’s that I don’t trust myself. I’m lonely. I want another person in my life to be close to and snuggle with and be nerdy and weird and make sexy rumpus. Unfortunately, I don’t think that I deserve that. And, honestly, aside from the rumpus, I have found all of those things in my friends. I’ve managed through years of depression and self-abuse to convince myself that I’m not enough to have that counterpart. And I’ve been hurt in really fucked up ways by the people that I have let in. So I’ve built myself the Great Wall of Kim, and I’m really fucking picky about whom I let in.
It’s a horrible Catch-22. I want what I don’t think I’m worthy of, and will thus never have.
I am the queen of self-fulfilling prophecies.
