Thursday 4th September 2025

The problem is that part of me doesn't want people to know me.

 I am ashamed and hiding is what I do best. Avoiding attention makes me feel safe. I almost don't want to be perceived.

If I let people get to know me then they will find out. 

I spent years cultivating friendships and learning to care but God if they could see me now. Makes me feel sick.  

Something like: the things that protect you also keep you caged.

I think Sabahattin Ali wrote "the more I needed my friends the more I longed to run away" at the start of Madonna in a Fur Coat and the first time I read those words I didn't really get it. I was in the Hagia Sofia museum in Istanbul, I was renting a little room in a run down terrace house, I had a job that I hated and couldn't seem to unstick myself from and I had gone to visit my friend's family for a couple of weeks.

I didn't have much, but it wasn't nothing either.  I just feel like everything is so much more materially worse right now and I am fucking glued to it. I have all the same problems that I had back then but more.

I can barely stand looking at myself. I don't want to be seen.

Is that not the most paradoxical bullshit about loneliness? The desire to be seen and to be recognised versus the desire to hide so that nobody can see me?

What if somebody did see me and loved me anyway. What then?

If somebody really saw my incompetence, my cowardice, my greasy skin, the mess, the fear, the avoidance and decided it really wasn't so bad?

It's like no matter how many times I disappoint myself, I have to be that person to have any hope of freeing myself.

And when would I actually be good enough that I no longer felt like I wanted to hide? What fucking benchmark is there? What goalposts can I nail down?

Whose standards do I not measure up to? Who gave me these standards? What level of competence is good enough to allow myself to share who I am with other people?

Do I need militaristically organised clothes, dishes, carpets, dust free shelving before I can fucking talk to someone and make a new friend?

Is renting a room enough or does it have to be a whole property? Does it have to be a mortgage? Am I not good enough until then? Am I not worth knowing until I leave my parents bungalow?

What kind of job is good enough? Surely I am only worthy if achieve a set amount of hours? Do I only count if I have a career and not a silly job that doesn't matter?

If I have no money then am I really as useless and as worthless as my dad said? Am I wasting my gifts? My intelligence?

And when will I ever be enough to allow myself to love someone again? What fucking point do I need to summit before I allow myself to fall in love? 

Because on some level I thought it was my fault, I thought I was too codependant, that I deserved to have my heart broken and my safety shattered.

I thought that one day I would become self-sufficient and only then would I be good enough. Only then would I stop myself from being hurt and being lied to. That I just had to wait until I became my own person and then I could try dating again.

But I'm just being avoidant. If I conveniently never become good enough then I never have to try.

So long as my goalposts are arbitrary and self-sabotaging, then I will never be good enough, I will never have to risk being seen for who I really am.

Because that is what happened. I showed my most honest, vulnerable parts of myself to somebody and was found to be lacking.

But really in distance, that wasn't the life I wanted, that isn't the person who I should have been vulnerable with because they were matching my honesty with lies. That relationship wasn't good for me either. 

It was just like sticking a bandage over a festering wound and then leaving it there for years. I was traumatised and I wanted to feel safe.

Something closer to the truth, it was a bad match. I have different standards for the kinds of relationships I want to have now. I have different standards for the kind of person I want to be.

Stuck in my head: Carrion Comfort by aeseaes

Watching: Long Story Short on Netflix

Reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton