Crush To Crash

I knew the depression was in the post. It started on Tuesday, with that sense of utter exhaustion as I could not drag myself out of bed. This morning, it took the shape of insomnia, ripped out of sleep, wide awake at 6am.

P was in my dreams again, a shadowy reflection, a post of his photograph, and as I woke I realised something awful.

I'm doing it again. I have this awful, negative habit of effectively outsourcing my self esteem to an (usually oblivious or outright apathetic) man for whom I look to for approval or validation or just some kind of *reaction*. It's dressed up in a crush, but it's that old fashioned impossible craving for the distant daddy's attention - come on, just turn around, *notice* me, dammit. Pretend for one second that I'm actually a human being worthwhile of your attention.

It's total self sabotage - I usually do it when I'm about to embark on some big or important-to-me creative endeavour. It's almost like I *plan* some way of stripping away any uplift of self esteem such an event might win me.

And when the inevitable rejection comes, it's crushing, in every sense of the word. It's not just my achievements which are diminished, reduced to nothing, but my very self because I am unable to perceive anything good about myself, except through the eyes of this idealised crush.

The horror he feels at me is the externalisation of mine own self loathing. I'm vile, I'm creepy, I'm grotesque, both physically and emotionally. Even if he does actually like me to start with, my bizarre behaviour and constant attention-seeking will drive him away.

And this destroys what little lift in self esteem I get from whatever mine accomplishments might be - it's worthless because *he* can't or won't appreciate me.

And I load the dice against myself from the state. Pick a man who is flawed to start with - OK, he has to like me enough to pay a bit of attention in the first place, which clearly means that he has disputable taste. Pick someone you know will *never* give you what you need - for example, look for validation from a DJ who has never, to my knowledge, in any of his posted charts that I've read, rated a female artist. That's bound to work out well, isn't it?

So now, on top of feeling like shit about myself, depressed, crushed - I'm also ashamed of myself, and ever so slightly angry at myself for being a Bad Feminist, for looking for validation, love, approval from a man. And here I am, lonely, isolated, miserable, pulling the rug out from the few positive things in my life - and on top of it all, beating myself up for all the ways I feel.