Stress

I feel like I'm dealing with a lot of stress in my life right now, but I have no one to blame for it but myself really. So, if you'd prefer to spend your day or night reading something less whiny, bitchy, and overall depressing. Leave now.

<rant>

So it's just been piling up for a month or so now, approximately a month and 20 days or so I'd imagine. Right around the time where there was probably a flurry of activity on this blog and then a period of silence while I focused on schoolwork.

Let's start at the beginning.

I was having an undefined relationship with a girl I had been introduced to by a good friend of mine. Her and I hit it off, and ended up having a sort of going out phase toward the end of the year, we never were officially going out or anything, and just left it as a simple FWB situation, but we both knew that we were getting attached.

The summer didn't help break that. We talked almost everyday for at least a month, sometimes just calling each other out of the blue to say hello, or to inform the other of some particularly bad sex they had had. It was a very open relationship. We talked and talked, and had a good time, then toward the end of the summer she called me and decided that she really didn't want a relationship right now because she couldn't handle it, she was scared she'd hurt me somehow because of the way she is. I agreed with her that it might be best if we stopped doing anything beyond just being friends, but told her that if she changed her mind, I'd be down to try out an actual relationship with her.

Long story short, that didn't happen, whether due to minds already being made up, or to things I said out of some stupid area of my brain that says the wrong thing, and we now hardly talk to each other or see each other. Overall, it's not terrible and I don't really miss her that much. The focus of our friendship and brief fling was sex. And without that, everything that was built up came crumbling down and left me feeling a bit winded and numb to the situation.

Once I oriented myself a little bit, figured out that it wasn't going to change anything really, I moved on with my life. Sure I had no girl to hold, but I had my work, and that's all I needed I decided. I took a very full course load this semester. Five classes, all above the one hundred level except for physics, but that class is still hard because after all, it's physics. One of the classes is a graduate level class that I decided to take 'for fun' because the material sounded interesting.

Surprisingly enough, I met my new infatuation not too soon after school started. Just a friend of a friend who happens to live on the same floor as I do. We  became friends quickly and hung our regularly. I began teaching her guitar and explained concepts of computer science to her, she was interested in it and listened and understood everything with semi clarity. Considering the level of computer science knowledge inherent in a person my age is rather low most of the time (facebook and word do not count), I was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed her company. The classes she's taking are also interesting, as most of her classes involve theatre work and I was a stage manager in high school, we had things to talk about on her end as well. We even helped each other study for each other's midterms and learned things we would have otherwise not known. A particular night that stood out in my mind was the night we stayed up until 5AM talking in her room. Just lying on her bed and talking, I was pushing my luck a bit and was rather close to her, but she was fine with it. We had discussed how I was an exception to her no touching policy between friends. And that she really didn't mind when I touched her or was very close to her. I wanted to kiss her so bad. But, as per usual, I didn't. Emotions are a tricky thing, and I attempt to never act solely based on them. Unfortunate for me when the only way to date someone is to somehow push past that boundary. I got a hug at the end of the night when I went to bed, and I was rather pleased. Things were going slowly, but the overall trend had been promising. All my school work was assaulting me with assignments and difficult problems, but I persevered and even relished some of the challenges because I had my thoughts of her prodding me along. Why is always so much easier to be happy and face challenges when you feel like someone likes you?

As you might have guessed, things went wrong. Not because I acted and she rejected me or anything like that, no, something that I didn't see coming, but am not surprised about. She got a boyfriend. A guy in her class. I didn't know anything more than his name when I first saw the face book update to her relationship status, I was struck by it. Just sitting in my news feed, sitting there mocking me for all my hopes. I brought it up humorously with her the next day before we ate breakfast together, she facepalmed and complained about how it was important to him that it be on facebook. It was rather funny, seeing the usual feminine qualities of someone who needs to show off their status in the male side of the relationship. Granted she is a bit of a tom boy, it was still funny.

Feeling rather put out by the whole situation, I happened to say hello to her when she was studying for a midterm and she happened to have some other person with her. I immediately recognized him as a former classmate, and when she introduced him as who I knew him to be, I was even more thrown into a slump. He's attractive. He's confident. He's able. He's funny. He's charming. He's hardworking. He's everything that I hear when girls moan about the perfect man. I'm no competition. The only thing I have going on is that in the field of science I'm probably more endowed than he is. But what of it? If I can't be half as confident and wonderful as him, how could I have hoped to beat him? At first, I thought that, oh maybe it's just a relationship that will fall apart and nothing will come from it, but as I always do, I knew that that's not even what I wanted. I have an irritating trait. If someone I happen to like, ends up with someone I know. I back off. I wish them all the happiness I can. I hope that they'll do well, not for the person who I'm jealous of, but because I really want the person whom I also share fondness for to be happy.

Then came the schoolwork. With my feel-good missing in action, I began to be more stressed out by assignments, and the ever looming calculus quizes that seemed to become infinitely harder beat me into submission. The final nail on the coffin was when my professor 'suggested' I come to his office for help with the material, because obviously I wasn't understanding it right. Let me just state. I have NEVER been to a professors office hours. I have NEVER NEEDED any help besides my own wit and intellect. And the audacity of this man to suggest such a thing... such was my thought process when I read that email. I suppose that wasn't the final nail, this was, after submitting an online assignment, I immediately received a response from the professor telling me that some plot in the first exercise was "obviously wrong". Looking at the specified problem, I noticed that yes, it didn't make a lot of sense. In my frustration and stress I had neglected to actually think about the problem at hand. But for some reason, that night being the night I saw the update in my news field, it was too much for me. Luckily for my ego, my roommate happened to be over a friends house. So the only one bearing witness to my crying, literally, over a math problem was shared only to me and to anyone (not that there is) who reads this.

The feeling hasn't gone away either. Music doesn't help me, thinking about other things doesn't help me. Concentrating on my schoolwork only serves to frustrate me when the same professor condescendingly tells me that my approach to a problem I got wrong was naive and foolish. I know I shouldn't take things he says personally, but it's hard when you're used to being capable and all of a sudden you're the class idiot, and it seems like everyone understands but you.


So I just sit here, feeling sick, numb, and dreary. Trying to ignore the feeling and hiding it from my friends here as best I can, blaming anything they notice on my heel, which has ripped open due to some shoe problem's I've had.(I currently limp rather heavily) What's worst? Even though I feel awful, the tears won't come. The one thing that would probably help me let go of everything, to just sob and cry until I got everything out will not come. I can think depressing thoughts, it won't come. I can think about the girls I've loved and how I've been torn to shreds by all of them and still nothing. And that's the worse thing. My analytically mind I'm so satisfied with, that allows my peers to say to themselves, I don't understand, let's go ask Ethan, prevents me from feeling my emotions fully. I hate it, I say I hate it, but yet, I feel numb even while trying to decipher whether I'm actually feeling hate or not.

I'm so tired of being so fucked up.

</rant>