To the man who is finally happy being alone

Congratulations. You don’t need other people anymore. You are no longer wasting your time trying to be accepted by others. You can finally be the full manifestation of you. You can be yourself without feeling like you are suffocating. You are working harder than ever. You are running every day. You are working out—hard—and you just beat your squat record. You can finally think straight because everybody else’s noise isn’t clogging up your mental bandwidth. You can finally focus on yourself. Good job. You don’t like blindly trusting your feelings, but you are not. You’ve thought about the objective metrics. You can tell that this is the best you’ve felt in years. This is clearly helping and this is on the right track.

There’s more too. Even more than this. That little voice of self-loathing is quieting. You can actually hear yourself again. You can feel it, and it is starting to feel, if not good, per se, but at least not so damn tormented. You don’t want to kill yourself every night. You don’t continuously think that you are somebody who does not deserve to live in society—because you don’t care about what those people think anymore. And you feel a whole lot better.

You don’t even miss her, because she’s a drain on the things you care about—the things you need to protect—at all costs, or the world that you are barely holding together for yourself will collapse.

Here’s the secret: You’re not a secret genius here. You didn’t find some brand new path forward and upwards. You’ve found the actual exact formula for feeling better in almost any situation. Did you not think that literally removing yourself from complicated entanglements and large amounts of primal release would make you feel a lot better? It’s designed to. This doesn’t mean that you are doing the right thing, and this doesn’t mean you are doing anything to actually better your own life or anybody else’s life.

It means that you are uncomplicating your own life, short term, by putting aside the messy whiteboard and pulling out a clean one. It means that you are injecting heroin-lite through your workout endorphins and confusing this with emotional achievement.

You think you don’t deserve love, but you know that she does, and you don’t think you can ever give it to her because you are a pathetic piece of shit, actually, she is just confused, but maybe if you work hard enough you’ll finally pay off your karma and then you will get the love you deserve.

You’re not sure if you’ve ever felt love. Maybe you haven’t met the right person yet. Maybe when you feel the right person, you’ll feel it.

Except you know that isn’t it. You know that whoever comes by who is good enough, will never be good enough. You know that it really is you, because you can’t be happy with yourself for long enough to sit still.

You know she’s quite the person because you wish you could be better so that you could actually be with her—and you don’t want to tell her this—and you try to find literally anybody else to be with so that you could avoid being with her.

You would never say, “I miss you too,” when she calls. You’ll say, “I’m glad you came,” when she comes.

You would never say, “I love you.” You’ll say, “I would go significantly out of my way for you.”

You would never let her feel like she’s a part of you, because you don’t want her to be a part of you. You don’t want anything to be a part of you. You don’t want anything to have anything to do with you.

I know this is how you feel, because I have felt this way too. I wanted to break anything, and laugh about it. I did it in my mind. I did it over and over, in cleverer ways. Just destroyed everyone I cared about because I can’t seem to figure something out.