why why why

One of my newly acquired friends seemed to have dissected me well enough in only three months (he is smarter and more observant than most) to declare, when someone asked how I could say such a thing about myself (some deprecating statement about how I am most certainly not awesome, especially when you consider that things which are truly awesome are vast and amazing and do in fact incur the awe of the viewer, admirer, etc.), that I, Christine Fugate was full of...(and here he paused in an effort to find the exact word he needed to fill in that blank, which, had he held it up in the air a second longer, I might have added the word shit) he said,...doubt.

And there, in one word, in one statement, in one fell swoop, my life had been summed up for me and presented to me as a thing not to worry about anymore. It was his complete and succinct definition of me that I had been trying for so long to grasp, what was it about me that always led me not to trust anyone or care about anyone or question everything everyone said to me.

[In fact, I questioned myself out of many things that weren't so bad for me, with assurances now by hindsight, because I simply could not accept that there might be something valuable about me that made those things part of my life. I peddled in doubt, which I masqueraded as love, sex, violence, anger, bitterness, envy, hate, etc, just to give myself something to pass the time. My mistrust was heralded. Hating never felt so good. Nothing stood a chance in my life. I wore everything down, whittled away at all that was good, wiping wiping wiping with questions, concerns and wonderings. Or as Kurt Vonnegut said better in Cat's Cradle:

Tiger got to hunt,

Bird got to fly

Man got to sit and wonder

Why? Why? Why?

Tiger got to sleep,

Bird got to land,

Man got to tell himself he understand.

because you see, I kept asking why and I kept trying to convince myself I knew all the answers. And I didn't know anything and there was nothing to know; I just had to see myself from this alternate perspective, which had been tried before, but this time, it was so simple, just that one word (doubt) struck through the entirety of my being. There are no more questions to ask about why I am the way I am, that is why and that is all I needed to know.]

It's funny, because I keep thinking I'm at the top of where I can ever be emotionally, that I've reached the absolute summit and when I get there, I feel good about for a little while until my eyes adjust and my vision clears and there in the distance I see another peak I have to climb. What surprises me sometimes is when I look the other way at exactly how crazy far I've come and I see that there were shorter ways to get where I am now, with less struggle, less angst, but I went at it full of doubt. I didn't trust the way or myself to know the way.

Fuck doubting. Fuck doubting everything for doubting's sake. I'm tired of it. I say I'll be bold and saucy, a truthteller, a lover, a person who doesn't hold back. The pleasures I've garnered since that thick crust of misery was pulled away has been amazing. And I want more. Problem is, I can't stop being addicted to that shit. I can kick it for a week or so, maybe a month, but then I mess something up and it all comes raining down on me and I feel that familiar sense of failure and then the flood of questions and I hate myself more than I've ever hated anything. Because if I can't love myself, how can anyone else love me?