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[dearben]

30.09.20

Dear Ben

i. My parents have a neighbour, this pension-aged divorcee who lives alone. She’s got two grown children, both in high-powered jet-setting careers, whom she doesn’t talk to a lot. She calls pretty much on the daily to talk to my mother, and the isolation hasn’t been kind to her because we get the sense that she’s losing the plot. She called the other night ranting and raving about how I’d screwed up her phone, but Dad’s convinced that it was because she refused to update her iOS.

(FTR, Dad used to try to get me to talk her through how to use her phone but three unsuccessful attempts convinced me that you can’t teach an idiot, so I try to refrain from talking to her where possible).

Mum and Dad have tried to convince her to seek help, but that suggestion hasn’t been taken very well.

(I wish you could talk back to me, but let’s be clear that you’re really a figment of my imagination, because I find it so much easier to talk to one, and part of me doesn’t want to scare you away even though there’s realistically close to zero chance that we’ll ever talk again.)

Anyhow the real reason I don’t like her is because she is essentially who I fear becoming in the future – alone and isolated both by volition and vocation.

ii. I just got into a fight with dad and my sister about what a failure I am. I’d seen this coming for a long time since moving back in – Dad even took me aside to warn me in advance not to be a pain in the arse before I came home. Dad told me that he’s essentially given up on nagging me and only keeps it up instinctively because I’m his progeny, which only hammers home that it’s no longer just in my head but in life that I might’ve failed.

I thought that this was going to be my year, the year that life was finally going to start behaving itself, and then a pandemic came along and gave it all a giant middle finger. It’s been over 6 months yet I still find myself yearning for what could have been. Everyone’s like, “maybe this is the year you strip it all back and regroup, and emerge from the other end like a butterfly”. Since then Operation Butterfly has become my obsession but part of me thinks it’s a distraction from the mess my life’s become.

This year has essentially just rammed home time and again what a failure I am. Crappy job, no social life or skills, and hardly any personality and generally a terrible excuse for a human being. I remember the darkness starting when I was finishing high school – it was like I knew uni was the peak and after that everything would start going downhill. I’m always terrified of the possibility that I peaked way too early, but Dad reckons (rightly so) that I have a complex where I’m unhappy if I’m not the centre of attention. How ironic then that I seemed to have developed a meta-complex about this, rather than behaving constructively about it.

iii. Then kids I’d grown up with are off conquering the world, getting high-powered jobs, getting married, buying houses and having children (or all at once). I can’t even hold down a boyfriend who doesn’t espouse right wing tendencies or isn’t a kidult. But then that opens a pot-kettle situation which I quite often run out of steam to cycle around.

Sarah’s said that anxiety does this – that it zaps the energy to give a fuck, resulting in one becoming an arse to the world because what’s remaining of that energy’s just directed towards keeping the basic systems running. I can’t even figure out how to format excel spreadsheets anymore. It’s super funny because I feel like I don’t have the patience to understand mental illness anymore, having fallen into that chasm despite once being so curious about it. I somehow manage to drown every day while decrying everyone else in the same boat for being a wimp. It’s days like these that I can’t picture the sun coming up tomorrow – or if it does, that the world will be in grayscale.

iv. Gabby’s just made us do a gratitude exercise. Truth be told I’ve always been skeptical of these because every time I do that, the rug gets pulled from under me and things on that list just mysteriously disappear. Mihika said that it was almost as if I was scared of being happy, which was pathological, but is it possible that I’m just too lazy to be?

I don’t know why I’m writing, when I haven’t in such a long time (I was afraid, I think, that my writing had become mediocre but I don’t care now because no one’ll read this…I think). I’ve always been a fast talker, fast thinker – maybe I just have too many thoughts in my head yelling over one another like inkblots and fireworks, and perhaps this might help me slow them down. I don’t need this to look pretty or aesthetic – I just need to figure a way out of the knots.

v. What I want to say to Dad and Mom and Ying (and the world) is that I wish I had the maturity to own a house, or have children, or even make things different for myself when I’m not happy about them, rather than make excuses all the time and wallow in self-pity. Or even, just to be happy with myself. Buying a car was terrifying enough, and that was with Ying and Dad there to do most of the legwork for me. Why the fuck am I licensed to perform surgery and give people life-changing medical advice, when I can’t even drive properly without thinking I’m going to die every time I step into a car?

All I can promise is that I will try, but that there will be days when I’ll fuck up again and again, even though that’s not an excuse to let things slide. I’m afraid to talk openly about this because it’ll force me to confront that deep dark chasm that is my anxiety about being a failure in life, and if I’m not careful I might finally fall in.

I know that I have so much growing up to do because I’ve spent too much time with my head in the clouds – mostly as a distraction because I’m fed up with life and humanity. I want to say that I care enough to not be a terrible person, but sometimes I find it hard to be 10/10. Dad keeps telling me to be introspective and self-reflective but sometimes I feel like time alone with my thoughts isn’t helpful but that’s mostly because I end up wallowing in cycles of despair. I know it’s a cop-out whenever I call myself a failure because it’s the easy way out, to fall with gravity, but my choices have consequences and I don’t like what’s on the other end of that alternative. But treading water is getting so tiring sometimes – I wish I could accept that this will be for life but I find it difficult sometimes to realise that there are ups and downs.

vi. I have found myself indulging, more and more, in thoughts of what we could’ve been. I find that they tend to be more salient whenever things and times get rough. Kit reckons that I do this to comfort myself with the memory of the closest I came to success but it always comes with that painful shock from your rejection. Even though rationally, you were reacting or behaving normally and were honest enough as to warn me ahead of time that you weren’t ready for a relationship and were even kind enough to check up on me despite my stupid faceplant, it only made you more irresistible. How I have tried time and again to be rational and stop thinking of you on a pedestal; once I even forced myself to read through your old messages talking about how you’d moved on. Oh god, I thought the pain would kill me but it didn’t and here I remain a strange shade holding onto regret. We only met twice and I was stupid at both, and clearly stupid enough to keep using you as the benchmark for what every subsequent partner should be. It’s been nearly 5 years. It nearly destroyed the one who came after you because he wasn’t you and despite both of us trying it wasn’t fair for him to be compared to a memory.

But then I’m starting to wonder if what I’m really finding alluring about you are your qualities and successes. I wonder if you were just another right-wing conservative social justice denier with stunted career prospects living with his parents, I would still be enamoured of you – and I’m starting to come to the realisation that perhaps I might not be. But you aren’t any of those things (particularly the right-wing conservative) – and here I’m falling into my own trap yet again.

I sometimes flirt (and come close to) with the idea of just asking you. Not flirtatiously with an emoticon in an unexpected text, but with raw honesty. Are you still with her? Are you happy? How is working from home, since you were already an expert before this shitstorm hit. How do you become an adult? And do you ever think of me as anyone aside from a fling?

But then that would utterly destroy the boundary I put up for my own good, by not replying to you the last time you asked me, and I know realistically I have destroyed any chance of that happening when you must’ve found me stalking your LinkedIn. More importantly it will make it blatantly obvious that beyond those two times, I wasn’t anything but a blip on your radar. Maybe I prefer this illusion of you, after all, and confronting you in life will eliminate him.

You’re not the only guy I’ve done this to. Most of the time, I embarrass myself enough in my delusions that I shudder at the mere thought of ever talking to them again. Once, it worked out, but then I ended up getting bored and breaking his heart years later. I often wonder if this is karmic payback for being so thoughtless but again the rational part of my brain realises that’s a cop-out.

vii. When I was thirteen my parents made me attend this motivational seminar over summer break, which famously (and sensationally) involved bullying us to study hard by visualising our parents on their deathbeds. They made us chant the line “Choices have consequences” on the hour and it has stuck. It’s wavered in my consciousness at times, particularly when I’m swimming in depression, and I often feel guilty coming out of the zenith when I realise that I’d just left it up to fate and faith to float me back to normality.

Every time I go back to Singapore and want to visit the places of my childhood, I find myself saddened by how things have changed and how my memories are disappearing. Again, there’s that tendency to comfort myself with memories to the extent of wishing them to reality, again an impossibility. Maybe that’s a good way to let your ghost rest, by realising that that is all you are – a memory, and a fleeting one at that. Again, I know it won’t happen overnight but it’s worth a try.

The other main strategy that everyone espouses to that end is trying to make myself the best possible version of myself I could be, almost to convince myself I deserve better than you. But why should I need to convince myself when I could just believe – but oh, that is still strangely counterintuitive.

What would giving in and talking to you achieve? Realistically, it’s been two years since that last message that I never answered, so quite possibly an unwelcome shock to you because why won’t I just rest and move on with life already? Awkward, almost immediately, because I’d been stalking your LinkedIn. You’d ask me how I was and I’d either a) launch into a diatribe about how I hate my life and existence and you’d be stuck at an awkward loss or b) I’d lie outlandishly about how my life is fucking awesome and you’d congratulate me and I’d struggle to fall asleep in self-loathing because my reality is anything but. So not a good outcome either way.

My choices have consequences, right? So talking to you, in both scenarios, would result in a negative, soul scorching outcome. I don’t ever want to have to endure that gutwrenching ache ever again, the choking sensation of my heart almost being hooked out of my chest. So rather than contemplate that today, let me figure out how I’m going to try and fix one broken part of my life, in planning out what to say to my family when I apologise for tonight’s outburst. Hopefully some of my earlier reflections will help.

And I know that this isn’t goodbye, not just yet. Perhaps I will one day be ready to finally lay you to rest. For now your phantom will just need to listen to my rambling emotions. For some reason or other I don’t think you’ll mind, so thank you for that. Maybe I’ll know you’re ready to go when I no longer have anything to say to you.