I Only Like You For Your Spotify Playlists

Flowers. Giggle-filled hours lost over shared dessert pizzas. Time slows down just enough for you both to wallow in each other’s morning flames. Gazes held for infinity, until your cheeks set on fire and your heart threatens to escape out through your eyeballs.

Typical falling for someone story, amirite?

Not for me. Briefly enter my emotional manifesto with me:

There’s a man. Say you met him in a flippant, inconsequential way when you were on the precipice of your epic emotional blowout (apparently, we don’t say breakdown anymore) and you couldn’t tell up from down but you just seem to stretch sideways on and on and on. Banter was his bait and you’re no stranger to nibbling at that lure, with your desperate love for puns and witty comebacks.

Initially, he tried but he couldn’t hold a place in your mind because your mind was no longer your own. It went wild, with no hope being reined back in, leaving your body to focus solely on survival, whilst your soul was missing in action.

In time, you emerged from that lower world of Hades, guided by no ally but the intrinsic knowledge that there was no other way but forward. As the light got warmer, you entertain the notion that yes, perhaps, this man can take you for a walk. And you occasionally walked together, some days hand in hand. The walks were gentle, stabilising and transformative.

I have walked with this man for all the wrong reasons. And I shouldn’t have. He doesn’t even take the same steps as me. He is driven by his stoic mind, not his heart like me, he’s unable to deal with my present, and I am perturbed by his past.

My self loathing is reflected in his lambasting, withholding his phone number and all the things I do wrong that displease him. He doesn’t want to be mine, not even in fantasy – he believes I’m venom. Even if I wasn’t just a girl undone, even if he cared, understanding my fetid mind would be out of his realm.

And in case my wobbly mind didn’t leave me exposed enough, his frustration and dissatisfaction with the way I am often cannot be contained and explodes at me, leaving me with my head hung and crying; fifty shades of vulnerability, next to the fruit bowl in my kitchen.

But there’s always a moment, where he is yelling and ready to storm out and my body contracts and that’s the exact microsecond that his voice softens and falls and I know we’ll end up in a carnal embrace.

So why the appetency?

Because when he holds me, I feel normal again. And I need that more than air. So far nothing, not yoga, not food, not therapy, not 20milligrams of benzos, not the nightly dreams I have about the men that came before him can normalise me like when I’m curled, back pressed to belly, into him.

Because he genuinely believes I’m beautiful. And fifty per cent of the time he’s seen me, I’ve been in my pyjamas and completely barefaced, a sight only my parents are privy to.

The man is incapable of not telling the truth. His mild Asperger’s ensures I never have to second guess his meaning. And when you can’t trust the truth of your own psyche, finding it in another’s words is like CPR for the mind.

How is it possible that someone as damaged as me can have feelings for someone? Easy. I only like him for his Spotify playlists, which are epic.

A Breakdown of My Breakdown (part one)

Big Man busted up my heart. It hit me unexpectedly hard. I knew on some level it was coming, so I prepared myself for the pain. Except that I truly didn’t.

The first day, I simply could not function. I kept a consistent Valium buzz going and watched thirty episodes of Archer back to back. I cried constantly for twenty four hours, even in my fleeting moments of sleep. I craved a cup of tea but it took me forty five minutes to remember how to make one.

I didn’t eat for the first five days. I didn’t even appreciate my protruding collar bones. I forced myself to go to work because of an important project which I kept humming along with a crumbling face and hourly hurried dashes to the toilets to howl with an ugly cry that only a woman can perfect. The routine would then be completed by me regaining my composure and then continuing to stare at a flickering screen for fifty six minutes until the next crying episode. Five thirty each day was my dim light in an enveloping darkness. It signalled the time to self medicate with a pinot until it was a reasonable hour to take Valium.

After a week, my appetite didn’t fully return but the acted of eating gifted me with distraction from the pain. I limited my eating to pad Thai, coffee, hashbrowns and pizza – even though it all stung my anxious and acidic gut.

I calculated that I visited the closest Drive Through ten days in a row. Usually crying, usually in my pyjamas. Geez those drive through workers must see some broken souls. My stomach was as sore as an inmate’s arsehole – I shat out my body weight in burning lava on the daily and I had a permanent stomach cramp. It was like my broken heart had slipped into my tummy.

Dressing in anything other than a tracksuit or pyjamas was close to impossible and there were a few too many days that I went to work in my uggboots. My co workers were beyond kind to act like everything was normal. It’s these tiny acts of grace that you realise the beauty in humans.

My senses were sensitive to everything that I had taken for granted. Perfume and strongly scented shower gel make me ill, opting instead for essential oils and natural hair and body care products. I was a walking cloud of patchouli.

I was literally unable to think of his beautiful daughter - it was like I had amnesia-d away her existence, except for those vulnerable moments in the shower when I couldn't escape the memories and all I could do was scream her name into the unforgiving chill of the tiles. I went into such a terrifying Persephone type darkness that I am now armed with the knowledge that you need 750mgms of Valium to die but they conveniently sell it to you in a 500mgm box.

I honestly and naively thought I would cry for two days and then carry about my business – there was no estimating the damage that followed.

To be continued...

Let Him Hold It

I’m scared. I am learning to love again. That sounds really icky and cliché. It’s probably a cliché for a reason.

It’s actually terrifying to throw your hands in the air and say ‘fuck it’, here’s my heart’. It’s a fragile little ball of crystal glass and I’m just ever so gingerly going to place it in your hands since you’ve convinced me, with your words, with your actions, that it’s okay to do that. That it’s the right thing to do.

And then you’re terrified. Your precious heart is sitting in someone else’s hands and they can just nonchalantly drop it at any moment. They could be distracted in a fleeting moment and accidentally crack it. They could get bored of holding it and place it down on the sidewalk for some passerby to step on.

You beg them not to break it. They say they’ll try – they’ll do their best. They’d never do anything to intentionally wreck it. But something deep inside you, something so convincing that you have no choice but to allow, says they no matter what they say, they are going to smash it beyond repair.

So you set up a 'round the clock'sniper to keep an eye on it. You are vigilante and scrupulous, never taking your bloodshot, sleep deprived eyes off it.

You snatch your heart back on occasion, knowing that they shouldn’t be holding it when they are drunk, when they are too far away – perhaps in another city. But it feels clunky in your own hands now, you forget how to hold it. You begin to question why you ever gave it over. Sometimes there’s a gentleness in the way they handle it that makes you remember.

You’re so anxious from making sure that chunk of glass does not fall to the ground that you lose yourself. You start being a bitch, you start being completely and irrationally insecure and terrifyingly neurotic. To the point where you don’t recognise yourself in any of your words, behaviour or even in the café window reflection.

When you’re like this, he no longer wants to hold your heart. He doesn’t feel like he could ever hold it the way you want him to, so he gives up.

All I’m saying is, you gave it to him to hold, so let him hold it. And if he damages it, it will mend when you remember how to hold it yourself. But you need to take the chance of letting someone else hold it. That’s what life is about.

Insecurity: the Worst Kind of Illness

I’m sick. And I don’t just mean that in a ‘I’m a sicko pervert’ kinda way. I have this illness which permeates my mind and rules my life. I am insecure. Terrifyingly so.

It’s like I woke up one morning and decided that I was just going to be embarrassingly insecure from now on. It was unexpected and uncharacteristic. I’m anxious and I’m separating from what I know to be my real self. I know where I’m supposed to be in terms of my thoughts, I just don’t know how to get back there.

I’m convinced that my boyfriend is flirting with girls on Twitter. Do I have evidence? Don’t be ridiculous. Why would I need evidence when my wildly wobbly mind is telling me so?

You know what he does when I verbalise my insecurities? Silence. So that works really well for my already perturbed thought patterns. You can only imagine how much I’ve convinced myself that he doesn’t care.

Should he abate my fears? Some would say, hell yes, some would say ‘work out your own damn shit Ruby’. At the very least he shouldn’t ignore me, right?

Sometimes he can ignore me for a whole day and because sometimes I can be a tad normal, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Once, I decided to see how long it would take him to initiate contact. He didn’t text me for three whole days. This was the man who spent six whole days with me for our third date.

I dunno, in my mind a relationship isn’t something where you get ignored a lot. But how do I know whether I’m getting ignored or my expectations are just too damn high? I don’t and that is my daily battle and so I get to hate and blame myself just a little bit more.

If we look at the theory of confirmation bias, I can easily use his behaviour to confirm all those unsettling niggling beliefs, beliefs that ‘I don’t deserve to be in a relationship that lasts’, ‘all men are unfaithful’ and of course, the all permeating one, ‘I am unloveable’.

I need your help internet – how do people quell their insecurities enough to have a relationship where your partner doesn’t spend most of their life avoiding you?

And he is somewhat innocent in all this, even if he is mucking up behind my back (although he’s hardly the type) or flirting with girls on social media or plotting to break up with me and shack up with some roller derby looking thing who knows how to do pin curls and quotes Proust, there’s not really much I can do about that. I can choose to torture myself with thoughts or I can choose not to. I know which one feels better.

'Your own enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts' – Buddha.