I’ve come to the realization that I’m still unhappy. I have a job (soon). I will (soon) have income. I’m traveling to a new place (soon) but I’m still not happy. I did a lot of thinking and the reason why not more or less came to me. 2017 is the year that everything went wrong in my life. But it was also the year that the dream shattered for me. What was the dream?

When I was 15, or there-a-bouts, I was watching some contractors make foundations for a concrete footpath from our front door to the street. Like most teenagers, I was constantly being asked, and trying to figure out, what I wanted to do with my life. In that moment, what I wanted and how I wanted to do it came to me. Or rather, the framework/rules did:

1. I want to work indoors. No mandatory work in the rain, snow, cold, heat. I want to work inside.
2. I want to have an income high enough that I can be the sole breadwinner for myself and a family.
3. I want to be able to save enough money to retire by age 55 while doing these things.

That was the framework for my life. #1 was the requirement for the types of work and career I would consider. Computers were something I had an interest in and was good at, so I figured why not just charge forward with learning about them? But any type of indoor work, from sales, to marketing, to professional services or even teaching work all qualifies.

2 was the purpose for my life. I did not exist for myself. I existed for the person I provided for. I existed for that family. But a family was never a requirement. Being the breadwinner was never about power or control, it was about being able to live out an act of love every day. “You do not have to work because I provide.” At age 24 I learned just how toxic the world had become. Women viewed the mere offer of such an outcome as hateful. It wasn’t until I was 29 or so that I realized that it was just the bitter subset of women stuck on dating sites because of their personalities who hated being provided for. Reasonable women were, largely, elsewhere. Some reasonable women are on dating sites, just not many. Same goes, probably, for guys too.

But in 2017 my hope for that future broke. I lost my job, I lost that concept that I could work for someone and as long as I did good work I’d have a good job. I lost stability in my plan and so many other things. I went on a date with a woman who was utterly wrong for me, but I let her hate convince me I was the problem instead of her. I haven’t recovered, and I can’t make myself believe in the dream anymore. I will believe in the dream once I’m already dating someone, not because I want to find them. At least, that’s where I’m at now. For my own good, I should continue to try and find a way to rekindle the dream before that day comes. Failing that, I need to find some other way to go forward with a positive view of the future without my dream.

This loss of my dream is the core problem.

3 was a child’s view of life. I knew people got old. I wanted to retire while my body still worked enough that I could actually make use of the money I’d saved to enjoy life. I knew I’d be busy raising a family, or working, or maintaining a lawn, or a hundred other tasks that are collectively known as ‘adulting’. Retiring before my body failed would be a chance to travel more than once or twice a year. It would be a chance to explore places with my wife, or take my children / their families to places. It was a reason to exist once the constant presence of work left.

As an older adult I realize that 55 was probably optimistic. Human lifespans are quite long and my own grandparents didn’t fall apart until they were closer to 80. Cryptocurrency and the stock market have largely made this problem irrelevant as well. I will, barring truly unforeseen circumstances, be able to retire within the next 2-3 years with a yearly income matching or greatly exceeding what I gross now.

But I need to focus on the dream, because I understand that it’s gone, but not why. And I often write here as a way to talk out my mental spaghetti into something more coherent such that I can understand where and how I am coming from.

Owning a house. Part of me wanted to, part of me didn’t. I hate mowing a lawn, but if I had a flat yard, I wouldn’t hate it nearly as much as I hated mowing my parent’s lawn. I hated raking leaves, but rare will be the yard with 20 oak trees in it. I wanted a house…why? I never really had a reason other than the privacy of being separated from other people. A condo or townhouse would never feel like a home to me. Having a piece of paper that says “you own this” doesn’t make it a home to me. Having a building that is physically separated from my neighbor’s home, that’s what makes it home for me. Those feet of distance between our walls make all the difference in the world. I never understood why, apart from being able to visible say that the entire thing was mine. That there was no question what, exactly, was mine.

I used to say I wanted to own a home so I could practice my violin. When you own a home, you can make a lot more noise than you can in an apartment. I haven’t really wanted to play my violin in years.

Do I want to own a home? Yes. I think I do. But for now, I have no idea where I want to own a home. That’s the problem with owning a home, it has to be somewhere, and once bought, it doesn’t move easily. I wanted to have a wife, I wanted to have…I viewed a home as one more root to lay down, not the first root. And I think that’s healthy. For me. I think it should stay that way. As good as this walkstation has been for my mood and my health, I hate that I can no longer move with just a car. But not enough to condemn that decision.

What about children? Children were always an unsolved equation completely dependent on the woman I married. Even at age 15, I knew that some women would be great mothers, and some wouldn’t. I didn’t know which I would marry. I never wanted to be the only good parents. Either we would both be great parents, or we wouldn’t be parents at all. That was always my path and plan.

I could talk at length about how and why I’d love to raise a daughter and see her grow into a woman. To watch the milestones in her life tick by. There would be so many great memories raising a daughter. That said, if I never had children my life wouldn’t feel incomplete. I can’t explain how that is true, but I know, in my soul, that it is. I could die without regrets having never been a parent. But I couldn’t die without regrets having always been alone. Having a wife is a requirement, having a family is an option.

Why? Why is having a wife a requirement? I was programmed. My father once told me, word for word, that the only reason I was born was so that someone would exist to take care of him when he was old and senile, and he wouldn’t have to go to a nursing home. My father, clearly, has not earned such a kingly gift from me. Nor has my mother, who may have been ok on her own, but who has basked in my father’s corrupting presence for too many decades.

That programming stuck though. The programming that I exist to care for someone. The programming that my only sense of reward or happiness that is beyond fleeting will always come from taking care of another person. It’s why I know getting a dog will never, truly, make me happy. A dog would just be yet another fleeting joy, when the dog came over to get pets, or felt lonely and wanted my company. But when he wanted to be alone? Back to darkness for me as well. No, the thing I love and care for must always be another person.

I’ve considered changing that base program. It would take someone beyond myself to rewrite that much of my mind and personality. That would be a multi-year project for a highly skilled therapist, if it could be done at all. Even then, I don’t know that it is necessary. Every life needs a purpose, and my purpose is simply to care for another person. Whom I care for is not specified, and therefore, my life is not negatively impacted in any grand way, apart from being alone and not having anyone to care for.

All lives need a purpose, and caring for someone is as good a purpose as any. So, truly, I don’t see that as something that needs to change. Rather, it is something I need to understand about myself, and something anyone who enters into my life, as a wife or good friend, needs to be able to endure the effects of.

My favorite memories of Christa and Rachel were the times that they needed me. All the times I drove up to Christa’s apartment late in the night or early in the morning to hold her while she sobbed from anxiety due to procrastination. The nights I held her while she grabbed a few scant hours of sleep before an exam. The times she asked me for advice on how to solve problems or fix things. Or the times Rachel called me because she was lonely. I loved few things more than feeling needed. I loved nothing more than having someone reach out to me and give a damn that I existed.

But none of this explains why I don’t think I can find someone who will care about me. None of this explains why the dream broke. And even now, I don’t fully understand why the dream broke myself. Hell, it took me these past, nearly 3 years, just to realize which, specific, dream had broken.

Christa never once said we were dating, called herself my girlfriend, or let me love her as one. She always refused any form of any relationship greater than friends. To this day, I don’t know or understand why. She was right, we are two different people, but I also think that if she’d have gotten over herself (she’s day “it’s not you, it’s me”, time and time again) that we could have forged better pathways over each other’s flaws, but there was too much…something, there for that progress to ever get made.

Rachel cheated on me because we got in one fight, and after that fight, rather than talking to me, she decided to talk to an ex. He told her what she wanted to hear, and she was stupid enough to listen. He burned her, took things from her she wishes she hadn’t given away. She told me as much. But she, to this day, doesn’t regret her actions. I no longer hate her, I just hate how that relationship ended. Still, it did more good for me than bad, overall. I stopped wanting to die. That’s a huge, huge accomplishment.

The girl I dated in 2017 was the….I have nothing good, at all, to say about her.

The sugar baby I had for 7 months was another stepping stone. What I had really wanted from a sugar relationship was someone who I started off paying so they’d talk to me, who would then fall for me because I made their life so much better. That didn’t happen. I didn’t have the kind of money to impress anyone in Boston. Or at least not anyone who’d talk to me. She always greeted her friends with hugs and warmth, and in the entire 7 months we were in an arrangement, I only ever got hugged maybe 3 times.

The important part of the sugaring was that it taught me many important and useful lessons:

1. I was 100% right to mandate a platonic-only arrangement. Sex would NOT have helped anything, and not feeling the shame is something I appreciate to this day.
2. Prior to she and I breaking up, I’d always assumed I was never right in a relationship, and that everything had always fallen apart because of my own flaws. I’d assumed that the girl was always correct, all-knowing, and never wrong. No, seriously, I really did think that. But dating that girl made me realize that I really was smarter than her about a great many things, and I really could see how the relationship would play out when she couldn’t. It was genuinely shocking to me. And it’s why I now write about Christa as her being her own worst enemy. I never believed that until after this 7 month sugar arrangement.
3. I learned to say no to bad relationships. When you’re paying thousands of dollars a month for someone’s time and attention, and you aren’t enjoying it, it makes it considerably easier to be honest with yourself about what you’re doing and how much value those actions have to you. I was able to break off the SR purely because I could honestly say to myself that her time and attention were not worth the price I paid to have them. Not paying at all, and having no one, was preferable to paying and being unhappy.
4. I realized how hopelessly naive I was believe that a relationship born of money and need would ever develop into something genuine. At least in this city. You have to provide life-changing income, and as well off as I was, I was never that wealthy. My income might have been life changing to someone who was still in college, but it wasn’t to someone who could work. I gave them double what they earned from all their jobs, and still they didn’t care. I have to pick my next SB more carefully.

Idk. Idk where to ramble from here.