Shitty people & dating is like a job hunt in Journal of life stuff

I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep because my heart is, well, not exactly racing, but more like beating at the rate as though I were at a brisk walk. Why? Because I ate too much sugar and chocolate. A reaction to the caffeine? Maybe. I choose to believe it’s my body punishing me for me punishing it. Why did I eat too much? Because I ran into a shitty person today. Yesterday I was playing Overwatch and joined a random quickplay group. We played a few games together and two people added me as friends. Yay! Today I saw one of them playing and I joined their group.

Within 3 games I got kicked for no other reason than one person who was a better ‘friend’ of that person said “kick this guy”. Why? No idea. He and I never exchanged words about anything. I didn’t pick on anyone or do anything that would have made me unwelcome. This was just the random shittiness people on the internet treat each other with because they can. The girl wasn’t interested in kicking me, but did it anyway at this guy’s pressuring. Not a good sign for their relationship, but I removed her as a friend anyway. I don’t need a source of pain in my life. Not another one. Someone else will have to dig her out of that shitty relationship once she wakes up to the reality of it. I can’t do that for her, not where I am now.

That upset me so bad that I decided to do something I wasn’t going to; go to a local store and buy discount Valentine’s day candy. I found a 2-pack of giant Reese’s hearts. 1 lb of Reese’s peanut butter cup in the form of two large hearts! Yay! Only now it’s 1am and I’m walking on my treadmill and writing a journal entry about shitty people because I chose to spend money on something I didn’t need to improve a mood that didn’t actually improve, and set my body back even further than I wanted it to be, which also didn’t help the mood…So, get this. I let one shitty person do damage to me. Material damage. I am so goddamn weak that I let one person being shitty to me completely derail my day. I used to have a sense of pride in who I was and how strong I was. Now..this? What the fuck happened to me.

I’ve been thinking about whether to move to TX or Indiana. I’m leaning toward Houston. Why? No income tax, no capital gains tax, lots of museums I like, great BBQ…the list of reasons is actually quite long. Why should I not move to Texas? The summers, humidity, and hurricanes/flooding. Flooding is, by far, the most realistic concern on that list. The summers will be hotter than I was used to in TN, but if I really…actually, yes, let’s talk about that instead.

I’ve been thinking, a lot, about where my life went wrong. For the first 30 years of my life when something went wrong I knew how to fix it. Now, something has been wrong since 2017 and I haven’t the faintest idea how to fix what’s wrong. Or if what I identified as the root cause is even the root cause. The more time that goes by, the more seriously I consider finding a therapist once I have medical insurance again and seeing what can be done for me. That’s it’s own bag of worms though. For now, it’s just me, myself, and I; and that worked for 30 years, so let’s see if we can make it work for a few more.

Prior to 2017, I lived with a belief that hard work paid off. If I put the work in at my job, then I could always have a job because I’d have a history of doing great work. Then I got laid off in spite of doing great work. Despite the fact that the jobs I have had since then have paid better and been good jobs, I haven’t ever gotten back that feeling that working hard at work would ever get me anything at all. This in spite of the fact that, objectively, I have continued to get my jobs precisely because I did such good work at previous employers and I can talk about what I did and why in such a manner that clearly communicates (to most people anyway) that I am very good at what I do.

Similarly, I spent 6 years losing 170lbs to get down to normal weight so women would find me attractive and I could go on dates and finally fix being alone. I went on one date, it was horrible, and I ‘realized’ that being attractive wouldn’t get me what I wanted. I’ve never managed to lose or even maintain my weight since then. Well, ok, let’s be honest, I didn’t fail once. I failed many times in the dating department. The first ever ‘reset’, I had was when I had taken a week off work to visit a lady I’d met online and three days before my leave started she called the whole thing off. I gained 10lbs eating myself into happiness while sitting in my apartment for a week, and I didn’t lose any of that weight for another year.

I spent 2 years talking to a girl I met online, but she never wanted me to come visit, and ended up being a school teacher in Alaska, and finally claiming to be an asexual as a way of explaining to me why she had treated me the way she did. …I have a history of being treated exceptionally shitty by people. The fact that these stories are all about women is the least relevant part of the story. They are people being shitty, gender be damned.

And yet, I feel like I can’t complain about the fact that people are shitty to me. If I say that, people assume I’m the problem. People assume I’m just whining. Even when the proof is objective, you can’t ever say that someone else was shitty to you because society has some sort of fucking problem with that particular truth. It makes my brain want to implode trying to understand the dark vortex of stupid that lead to that particular facet of society.

When they were rebooting the 007 franchise with Daniel Craig, they made a website that had lore about the 00 recruitment processes. It included various psychological evaluations of James Bond. One of the things that was highlighted was that he preferred solo sports and while he was a competent leader, his natural state was to exist alone or seek achievement and measurement in solo activities. I play Overwatch, but I hate the game. If I’m being honest, I do hate it. Counter-Strike 1.6 was the last time I really enjoyed an FPS. Tactical shields were and still are a dumb idea. Despite what everyone says, CS:GO is NOT the successor to 1.6. CS:GO isn’t the steaming pile of shit it used to be, but it’s not the game I once loved.

All of the VR video games I play have online leader boards. I can’t play any games, it seems, without having to constantly be reminded that someone else is better at them then I am. I loved playing Super Smash Brothers on my Nintendo 64 right up until a friend came over who was good at Ness. If you know nothing about N64 Super Smash Brothers, then the short version is that being good at Ness made you effectively invincible due to how his attacks and combos worked. He was actually unkillable until he was so damaged you could one-tap him off screen. If you failed to instantly kill him, he could always get back to the level.

So, it’s a completely different psychological problem I have that I can’t stand knowing someone else is better at something than I am. That is worthy of a therapist’s time. But that’s not a problem I can fix myself. Well, every problem is a problem you fix yourself; but I don’t have the questions I need to ask myself to find the solution, which is the same net result as saying I can’t fix it myself. But it is important to point out that I am both aware of and acknowledge the inherent lie in my shorthand.

In 2017 the work->reward loop got broken in my mind. I stopped believing that hard worked paid off. This in spite of the empirical proof to the contrary in my life during and since that time. Yet, no matter how many times I say that in my mind, I can’t seem to make progress past it. Well, I do, but veryyyyy slowly. You see, getting this verbal job offer has moved the needle forward slightly.

I was briefly excited when I got it. But I’ve since lost all excitement for the offer. Why? Because it isn’t real. The pay could change, the offer could never come through at all, the job description or boss or a dozen other things could all change. Unlike previous employers, I have no reason to believe this one would screw me over (other employers had an outright incentive to lie to me; this one does not). Yet, I still feel like even daring to be excited about it or believe it’s real is a mistake. Why? Because when I used to live that way I got burned, hard.

Ok, but let’s think it through. If I checked my e-mail and saw that the formal offer letter was in hand, would I feel excited? Yes. Would I feel happy? Yes. Would I feel anxiety? Yes. Dread? Yes. Ok, ok, hold on, let’s unpack some of that. I always get anxious with new jobs. My (only) girlfriend got pretty freaked out when she saw me have a meltdown over that fact. I have never had a meltdown that bad since, but she didn’t know what to do. The man she knew to be the strongest person in the world was now weaker than wet spaghetti. That happened because I always worry that I can’t do the job. That the boss will decide I’m a moron, that I’ll fail to understand something, or be working with peers 100x better than I am. It hasn’t been the case, yet, ever; but I still fear the possibility. See the aforementioned section on ‘I hate knowing people are better at things than I am…’ because this dread of not being able to perform and that annoyance with knowing other people are better than me both come from the same place. Why/how/etc I don’t understand, but they are linked.

If I saw the formal offer letter, could I stop trying to diet and go back to the lifestyle changes I lived under for 6 years that saw me lose an entire person’s worth of weight? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Would moving to Houston get me back on that train? No, probably not. Would getting a dog? No. What would then? I think the best idea I have thus far had would be finding a local dog park once I moved and making visiting that dog park a regular occurrence. Maybe the dogs are anti-social and never say hi, or maybe 1-2 decide they want to sniff out the newcomer and maybe get some extra pets. I could also look into humane societies/pet shelters to see if I could socialize with their animals. I don’t want the responsibility of owning a pet, but I do want the love they offer. The absolute best idea/outcome would be to make friends with someone at said dog park so I could go to their place and socialize with their pet. I think that would be the best outcome.

Do I want a pet? Maybe. But I want to know that I’m set in life and…I still want to travel. That’s the big thing. I want to be able to meet a girl who has never managed to leave her home state or otherwise not seen much of the country and take her on vacations. I don’t want to have to lock my dog away in a kennel for a week at a time every time I want to go somewhere with that girlfriend. No dog or other pet would ever be on the same level as a human. The day I change my mind on that someone please kill me because I will have truly lost my mind. No, seriously, assassinate me if that day ever happens. I’ll be fucking nuts at that point and death a worthy option to fix that problem.

Distraction aside, I need something that loves me. I need something that actively cares about me. I have been joining random Overwatch groups hoping to find friends who actively ask me to join them. In 6 months I have had 0 such encounters. I have tried to add people as friends and invite them; that too has gotten me nowhere. They are always ‘busy’, then remove me as friends. I don’t understand other humans. I love people, I love people more than they want me to, and I can’t understand why in a world so lonely, being loved by someone is seen as so goddamn terrifying unless you already know that other person is attractive. Fucking hell.

And yes, I know that, probably, one of the readers of this post goes out of their way to talk to me and send thoughtful messages. I do notice. But I also hope you realize we will never go beyond friends. I appreciate the information and the chats, but there is a limit on where that will go and I just don’t have the heart to bring it up in out messages because while I see the patterns there, it’s just too much of a dick move to point it out in the middle of the conversation. Ugh.

Right, but walking around my apartment in circles again I had a thought worth writing down and exploring: I need to view my body and dating activities the same way I do my job hunting activities. There is no such thing as a resume for dating, and if there was, it’d be no more effective than the resume I have for my actual work, but I should have the same confidence in dating I have in the job market. The two sugar babies I had were both shocked at how kind I was. As in, they would talk about it with a form of awe or reverence they never used at any other time. I didn’t ask; I didn’t guide the questions, both of them pointed to my kindness as the thing they appreciated most about me. Both also commented, in their own way, that I was a good person.

Outside of women I had to pay to get them to spend time with me, the one girlfriend I ever had never got over the fact that I was the only boyfriend she’d ever had (in 15 or so years) who never asked for nudes. Who had never seen her nude. Who had never asked to see her nude. She saw the hunger in my eyes and knew a red blooded male lived inside me, but she also knew there was a form of self-control there she simply didn’t understand. She herself lacked something similar, and never had dated anyone else who had such a thing.

I have many good qualities. I have many good capabilities. And just like a normal job posting, I won’t be the right fit for every job just as I won’t be the right fit for every person. A trait endearing to one is annoying to another. I need to approach dating with the same mindset I approach the job hunt: it’s a numbers game, and I have to say yes or no to the people who bother to respond, and not try to find the ‘perfect job’. I need to let the perfect job (person) bother to respond, and discover that it’s the perfect job (person) after talking to them.

Why? Because I have always been an extrovert. I have always loved people far more than they want to be loved. I have hundreds of examples of this. I need to find someone who views my freely giving nature with appreciation rather than disdain. This is what I must do. And, because match group owns all the online dating sites now, I need to do it in person exclusively. Online dating isn’t an option for me anymore. So as much as I want to make a new OKC profile and try to talk to people in Houston ahead of time, I know that’s actually just a waste of time. Well, I don’t know that, but I do know how…sigh. Like a resume posted online, there’s always that chance that someone views your resume and says ‘hi’, but 99.99% of the time you’re going to find that job by applying, not because they find you.

That’s the big takeaway from tonight. I need to view dating like I view job hunting. I need to shotgun my attention into people and see what sticks, and I have to not get hung up on what I ‘want’ to happen, and instead only concern myself with the attention that is returned to me.

It’s funny, this sort of realization is not something new. In fact, men have been doing it for years. It’s the thing women hate most about online dating. The overwhelming message spam. Yet, when was the last time you ever heard of a girl spamming guys? It doesn’t happen because it doesn’t need to. The imbalance exists because the equation got started off imbalanced and hasn’t corrected yet. I hate that I need to add to the problem, but, well, if the car take gasoline to run, no amount of lithium ion battery cells added to the fuel tank will make the engine turn over. You have to use the system the way it was designed, not the way you wish it was designed.

I want this job offer to come through, unaltered, as promised, so that I can start to restore my faith that not everything is a lie and shitty. I need this to work out. I need to be able to believe in the world again. I need my faith rewarded, not destroyed.

Also, I changed the level on my treadmill and I think the pain in my foot is going to finally be able to heal and that my lower back isn’t going to be in agony. I might have finally gotten it adjusted just right so that I can walk without being in pain. It’s taken me around an hour to write this post and all I am is warm, normally I’d be in enough pain that I’d want to stop.

I really do hate this waiting game. I want to know if the job offer is going to come, at all, or not; and if it does come, does it come as promised or with alterations? I want to know. I want to stop worrying about it and get on with living my life.

Also also, a lesson I learned REALLY late in the game: when a recruiter or other job asks if you have any offers on the table, the answer is that you have interviewed at other places, and suspect you’ll get an offer in 3-5 weeks, based on what they said. If the recruiter doesn’t believe in you, they’ll drop you then and there, saving you from wasting your time with a job that wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway. If the recruiter does believe in you, it will fast track your job process. There is literally no reason to be honest about what offers you have or are likely to have. Professionalism be damned, they ask that question to harm you, not to help you. So fuck that noise, use the realization of that fact to get what you need out of life at their cost, not your own! Fucking asshats going to treat other people like doggamn cattle; guess what shitbag, two can play that game!