Humpty Dumpty

Today was a stressful day.  I feel I should be more settled in my new job, although I have only been there for three weeks.  I made some stupid mistakes at work.  The biggest was beginning to walk away from the library issue desk at lunchtime before being relieved, until called back by my boss.  The stupid thing is that I do normally know that the library issue desk should not be left unmanned.  I was even thinking about it previously.  I don’t know what caused my momentary lapse, but I spent the afternoon feeling ill (I feel as if I’m coming down with a bad cold: runny nose and eyes, muscle aches, blowing hot and cold, tired; I’ve probably run my immune system down as I only get about six hours of sleep before work days at the moment) and I was already feeling bad then, so it’s possible that I wasn’t thinking straight and there was just an instinctive impulse to get out in the fresh air and eat something to feel less ill.  I soldiered on all afternoon, but felt too ill to accomplish much after about 3.30pm.

As a result of childhood experiences, I tend to assume that if I am not perfect I will not be accepted and if people get momentarily annoyed with me (or if I even suspect they are annoyed, when they might really be tired, irritable or distracted), I tend to assume that they are still annoyed with me unless and until they explicitly tell me that they aren’t annoyed with me, which can result in my giving a wide berth to people for long periods for no good reason.  It is also worrying how quickly my mind moves from “I made a mistake” to “I’m a failure” to “I deserve to die” to “I want to kill myself” (I wasn’t actually suicidal per se, I just wanted the ground to swallow me up).

The other thing that happened today was that I texted my date from last week to see what was happening.  My mother told me not to do this, but I decided I needed closure (I hate all these arcane incomprehensible rules for dating, which only seem to exist to trip up people like me).  My date sent me a vague text that seemed to be telling me that she can’t cope with my mental health issues (although it took a second reading to be sure of this) and she seemed surprised that I was contacting her, even though when we last met she had said she wanted to think about things, not that she was definitely not interested.  I suspect she was too scared to dump me outright, which I sort of understand, but it is still upsetting to be left hanging on for days on end and then to be sent a vague text which is still not 100% clear about what is actually going on.

Once again, I feel that I am too broken to get married, but too honest to try to hide my issues.  I would in theory be open to holding them back until a relationship begins to develop, but they tend to come out earlier, probably because they have defined the whole of my adult life and I am too honest and too bad a liar to cover that up effectively.  My only relationship was with someone who had issues of her own, but that didn’t work because she didn’t help me with my issues, nor did she take care of herself, so I ended up dealing with two sets of issues (mine and hers) without any help from her.  If I date someone with issues (which I am open to doing – most people have them, particularly by their thirties) I think she has to be dealing with them at least as well as I am dealing with mine.  I do not think that that is an unreasonable request.  But if she was dealing with her issues, why would she want to date a screw up like me?  And this is without taking into account my weirdness, my poor social skills (see the first paragraph), my non-attendance of yeshiva and uncertain place on the frum spectrum, my looks, the sins and guilty conscience I wrote about yesterday… all the other reasons that count against me finding someone.  When I wrote about this previously a friend emailed to say that finding a partner is not about not being broken, but I that is what my experience has been until now.

The plan is to rest from dating for a couple of weeks to get settled into the new job and then go to a matchmaker, but I am not very hopeful, both because I feel like a screw up and because I’m sceptical about how successful matchmakers actually are, even though they are the norm in the frum world, which is, after all, where I am looking for a partner.

Still, while there’s life, there’s Doctor Who, so I’m having vegetarian chicken soup, pizza and more of The Invasion this evening to try to cheer myself up.