California acid psychotic mania, april ,2010, prologue
“Everyone Loves You”
Note: the events of the 6 months i lived in oakland, california could have their own entire blog about them so i’m endeavoring to start a series. this is the pre game. i hope i can tell the “move to oakland and fuck everything up” tale in more detail, its just wider in scope than a basic blog post.
when i was 24 and living in my home town with my then girlfriend of 5 years, i made an interesting call: abruptly stop all psychiatric medication, break up with my long term girlfriend and move to Oakland, California where my oldest friend was smoking medical pot. “i should be smoking medical pot”,, i thought. i thought of the bay area like it was still 1967 ( real life: it was 2010). i should have really known that San Francisco's idyllic hippie utopia had been ruined even before the summer of love came.
after all, with everything i knew about the grateful dead by then, youd think i’d have noticed the town overrun by speed freak homeless by the end of ’66, over 50 years before i set out to be a prophet on the burning shore. the facts of real life weren't super important at that time. i wanted to go be a legal pot smoking hippie and that was that, garcia’s ghost would be picking me up at SFO.
so i told everyone i was transferring my retail store job to oakland and moving outta town…i told everyone except for the young woman i had been dating for over 5 years. Such honest, transparency. in the end though, i was doing her a favor: i had already become a daily blackout drunk, and a co-dependent cheater. i really had no concern outside of my own feelings and desires, until i learned about how to care for others, years later.
after getting caught cheating again, it all came apart with “T”. perfect excuse to escape to the west coast. she was sobbing, i just wanted to at least reassure her about post Ev life.
i told her that she'd be ok, everything would work out. the way she responded still sticks with me, she said: “real easy for you to say, when everyone loves you.”.
she wasn't wrong, my mother called me the mayor of our hometown, i knew everyone, everywhere. not that i’m bragging about it but i was also popular and well liked in high school (thanks to drugs, alcohol and a hippie makeover after 8th grade from bullied nerd to jeff spicoli stoner).
the point of the memory of the final words from that person i had become so close to for years is that even if everyone loves me: it doesn't matter, i cant believe they have reason to. other people have told me this same thing, it makes my eyes water up. what do they see? if they all knew the real me, i’d be properly hated.
i feel as though i’m cooler than everybody, but obsessive over their opinions of me. and i try to act like a stoner, not-give-a-fuck aloof type. inside i’m wondering what you think of me, obsessively.
its as simple as this: self hatred is my absolute core value. i need to figure out how to change it, but that's just how it is. you could ask anyone that really knows me, they'd tell you the same.
low self esteem kept me from writing, it kept me afraid, ashamed and feeling undeserving of the good sober life. fear and a lack of love for myself kept me underachieving in all areas one can fail in. self hatred makes all the deplorable aspects of addiction seem somehow acceptable and deserved,
low self esteem molds so many things: what i deserve in terms of relationships, finances, work. i know i have refused good opportunities.
if everyone loves me, i have no idea why. if i could find a way to teach myself the truth it would be my heaviest weight to shed, i would move through life more comfortably.
my therapist quit, so lucky for you all i have is this blog. how do i love myself as much as i love everyone else? ev.penk7@gmail.com.
Did you know that if you enjoy my writing that you can actually buy me a coffee? yes! https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17 all the external support helps the ego but honestly there’s no sustainable way to be ok if i cant pull it from the inside. a man could still use a cuppa joe.
