Stuck in Journal of life stuff

Woo! Vacation week. Yesterday was a women’s build day with Habitat and I spent the day with two ladies jackhammering out a floor in the basement of a house we’re renovating. The ground water is up so high that the concrete (more like mortar since it’s literally about 100 years old and nowhere near the standards of modern concrete) is saturated and even with our drills/jackhammers, they would get stuck in the muck. Between that and stupid diet choices (not eating protein for breakfast, not bringing my own high protein lunch) I was unable to lift the jackhammer by around 1pm.

I should explain that. Pain and I are something of strangers. When I was in high school I my weight training instructor was the first person ever to pull me aside and tell me to slow down, do less weight, or take the exercises easier. He told everyone else “work till it hurts, then keep going.” But he realized early on that for me, ‘hurt’ was actually harmful, whereas for most high schoolers ‘hurt’ is just a notice that they’re lifting something heavier than a cheeto or pencil.

I didn’t have him around in college, and I injured myself several times exercising too much. Even with P90X3, it wasn’t until I was working out with someone that they again told me to go slower, and use less weight, that I really started to see progress instead of agony. So…a lot of people would complain about being in pain when they couldn’t lift the jackhammer anymore. But for me, there was no ‘pain’. Sure, my muscles were tired and I could tell that, but it didn’t ‘hurt’. I just tried to lift it and nothing happened.

If I had eaten about 90g of protein by the end of lunchtime, that wouldn’t have happened. I could have easily spent all day jackhammering. Oh well, lessons learned.

True story, I originally started going to Habitat to try and meet single women. Everybody says “Get a hobby and you’ll find a lady there!” 3 years of habitat and that statement has proven to be 100% false. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m just annoyed. Whatever. Houses get built, families get homes, the world goes on.

I feel stuck though. Every time I start trying to fix what’s broken in my life I get to the same point and…instead of seeing something broken I can fix I just see a massive void. If there was land, you could build something on it. If there was water, you could build something in it, or on it. But…this isn’t even space. This is a void. Not empty, literally ‘nothing’. When I lost my faith I lost the thing I could build on. I’ve never been good at making myself happy, and that was why I stuck to religion for so long. If there’s a higher purpose, if dedication to something greater than myself matters, then there’s a foundation to all that ‘nothing’. But when that belief is broken, nothing becomes nothing. And you can’t build on nothing.

So then I try a different tact and I try to retrace my steps to how I got here. How did I get to this state of nothing. And the path is always the same. I started losing weight because I looked in the mirror and saw that I really needed a bigger shirt (bigger than a 2xl) because my current one was too tight. And I said “no, fuck that. I’m NOT buying a bigger shirt!” And thus began my weight loss journey.

But somewhere in there, the idea that I was enduring the feeling of being hungry all the time was paired with the ‘delayed reward’ of being desirable one day. Having someone want me. For 5 years I lost weight and got all the way down to ‘normal’. Not obese, not even overweight. Normal. I didn’t have a 6 pack. I was at a medically healthy weight. I got a date, that date went horribly, and I walked out of it thinking “I did all this, and that’s the sort of Christian I get? That’s the sort of woman out there waiting for me?!” And so many things broke all at once.

How is it a shared faith when the Christians you meet all look at you as pure evil when you say you disagree with LGTBQ+MKJLHDLJKFHSJKHDKJL@#($#ZIO()!)( (anything I’m missing?). How is it a shared faith when they cannot accept anyone who hasn’t grown up in the church and had a perfect life? How is it a shared faith when one person says I have to speak in tongues to be saved, and another thinks morality is relative? My faith broke because I wanted an internal excuse to try dating women who claimed to be agnostic or atheist. But it also broke because there was no community. Not up here. Not in this literally Godforsaken place.

But then there was the woman herself. Not the first, but the last, in a long line of women who refused to let me be a man, then got offended when I wasn’t ‘manly’. I can’t buy them dinner because then ‘they owe me something’. I can’t even question them wanting to be stay-at-home moms lest I incur their wrath for daring to take away their independence. …I could go on, but with time I realize the problem here is not women. It’s progressivism. I live near Boston. This should shock no one. Sane women do exist, even here. They’re just super rare near where I am. In other parts of the country, they are more common.

What helped me recover from the spate of progressive-lady dates was being a sugar daddy for a while. I got low. I got so desperate I was willing to pay someone to go on dates with me. They were always platonic. I can’t, ethically, deal with the concept of paying someone for sex. My mind can’t handle it. How did it help? Because when you’re paying someone a few grand a month to spend time with you, and you don’t enjoy your time with them because they’re late, or they are on their phones, or they know you value alone time with them, so they insist on dates in public (even after you’ve had dates in private many times), then it’s easy to say “hey, you know what, I’m not paying you anymore. Bye.” Every potential sugar baby I talked to I told to view sugaring like a job. Do well, you stay employed. Do badly, get fired. I also told them that wasn’t my rule, that was more like reality’s rule. But sugaring taught me how to say no. That’s not something I could ever do before. I couldn’t look at a woman I knew was wrong for me and decline a date. I couldn’t look at a job offer I knew was toxic and decline it. I couldn’t say no to things I was desperate to have, especially when they were bad for me, because I was so desperate to get that check mark in my life of having that thing that I’d destroy myself to get it.

In many ways, where I’m at with weight loss is the same thing. I want to feel happy more than I want to get back to being normal size. Because I was normal size, and women weren’t any more attracted to me then than they (aren’t) now. So why bother not eating that donut? Why resist having another piece of candy? Why resist not eating a second dinner, then a snack? It goes on and on. The excuse is always the same. There is no delayed reward if I don’t eat the thing, but there is a reward right now if I do. I need to find the sugaring equivalent in the food intake world. There are old people, and there are obese people. There are no old obese people.

But even that isn’t motivation. I spent 13 years wanting to kill myself every.single.day. That desire ended when I had my first (and thusfar only) girlfriend. It was strange to wake up one day and realize I hadn’t wanted to kill myself for a month or more at that point. So much of my life, my routines, my very identity was tied up in just trying to keep myself alive that once that burden was lifted I legitimately didn’t know what to do with my life. I talked about it with my girlfriend at the time and she had no idea how to direct me either.

I don’t think I really need a direction. I just need tasks. It’s why I focus so much on not being alone. I will never have tasks I care about for myself. Because, for myself…I don’t want to kill myself anymore, but that isn’t the same thing as wanting to live. You can sit in a corner and eat until one day you can’t stand anymore, then either you survive on fat long enough to stand again, or you die. And to me, that isn’t the same thing as suicide, even though to any objective outside observer it is. The difference is in motivation. Suicide says “kill yourself”, this is more like apathy. It says “Stop trying to stay alive.” It is, and isn’t, different. And that apathy is where I’ve been since I lost that girlfriend. I have no reason to kill myself, but I also have no reason to keep going, or trying, or accomplishing.

Bitcoin is going up again, and in 2.5 years time I’ll be worth millions unless something totally unforeseen happens. I’ll be able to retire with a lifestyle beyond what I have now. I could afford to buy any sugar baby I wanted. Hell, I could afford outright pornstars if the (aside from drugs) Charlie Sheen lifestyle appealed to me. But…that’s not a future I really want. All I’d be doing is replacing food with sex. Better for my obesity, not better or anything else. Are you starting to see why this problem fills me with such desperation? I want to fix myself, but I can’t find a path forward that works. Not alone anyway.

And no, it isn’t lost on me that earlier I said I can’t mentally handle paying someone for sex and then in the paragraph above seem to suddenly be ok with the thought. The truth on that dichotomy is somewhere in the gray area between “if you pay them enough they’ll feel some attraction toward you anyway” and “at that point, I’ll just look to my evil side and say “fuck it, you won. Have fun.”” It’s…somewhere between those two.

The morality / problems / evil ethics of women selling themselves are not lost on me. To the logical part of my mind, it is every bit as horrific as it is to the women in those situations themselves. But any living human knows that at some point, their emotions can override their logic. That’s the outcome I think might happen in my future. It’s not an outcome I look forward to, but it is one I know can become reality.

This is as far as I got before ‘ooh shiny’ happened.