Confessions of a New Age Burnout

Breakthrough or Breakdown?

It always seemed to me that love was the important piece. Everywhere I'd turn the small moments of care and attention carried people through the treachery of day to day life.  And it'd be the warmest of smiles exchanged between the elderly couple sitting together at a restaurant.  Or the giddy closeness of sisters, more sure of themselves while out in public so long as they're joint at the hip. 

Too often love is held to some discriminatory platform.  As if romance is the most potent, supple kind. Like the expressions of care occurring by the millions all around us each day are only half valid. All the while being the more dominant part of the picture.   A lesson I learned the hard way, even if I am equally as unsuccessful in my non romantic relationships as I am the romantic ones.

But I've got your number. I can see right through the veil of love's conspicuous secrets.  The elaborate dressing of the main course of all human encounters.  A self deluded roadway to one of the sweetest joys; sex.  Which seems like everything and nothing.

I had this conversation with my counselor at the time after experiencing an emotional breakdown during fall of 2020. A trying time for us all, I know. But like the cinematic crumbling of a house devoured by a crater during an earthquake, my life had collapsed into pieces. Inside I felt all the answers, ambitions, and safety I had once been able to rest assured with had come to feel like comforting lies. Things I told myself to get on with life with the right amount of brashness it takes for a young man to dare to be great.

On the night in question, when I experienced the previously noted breakdown...breakthrough.. as I like to call it...I was leaving a new job I had taken working in a print production/binding company. I hated it almost immediately but knew that I had to try something different to move forward. The subtext of emotions I carried within me during this day were already heavily doused with despair, devastation, frustration etc, a thesaurus of emotions. I was finding out just how difficult my life was and how complicated the world could be.

Upon leaving my dreaded new 9-5, I had been speaking to my gf at the time who was back in Baltimore and who began to speak to me as a distant friend you didn't have the courage to completely cut off yet. But on this night while talking about some obscure vision for the future she said it, "I could never be your girlfriend again." Highlighting two things; that we were indeed done and that any hope I'd held for a future together should be stomped on.

Similar to the feather dropping on a pile of stones crushing some poor subject underneath, this stone dropped on top of the pile and I crumbled into myself. I had lost my job a few months prior, was living back home after working hard to escape, and after months of drifting apart from the women I bought an engagement ring for, was telling me I wasn't it.

My counselor and I talked about this moment in a previous session. I wasn't all that keen to relive it but as with the structure of most of our conversations there's a method to his madness. We reframe what it is I think she was communicating to me. I say I think she means we've been through a lot together in two short years, we put each other through our own special version of hell, and probably that when she evaluated if I was capable of meeting her needs the answer was no or that the inverse of this as well was true, she'd become aware that she couldn't meet my needs either. I empathized with the fact. Maybe even appreciated she had the courage to do what I couldn't.

Also, I don't tell my counselor all the gritty details.  And truthfully I don't think he minds. I don't lie. I just sometimes prefer to leave things between me and the big man upstairs.  

At the time of my breakthrough, as I'm having this heart shattering conversation with my ex.  I also had been actively sleeping with two other women over the past few months and was semi in a new relationship already. Immaturity allowed me to believe I could have my cake and eat it to.  Though I did for a brief time. When the fabric of reality snapped back to self correct, the mountain of challenges and conflicting values I had rest my life upon made me the collateral damage of my own choices.