Packing up the dreams and moving on

I taught myself to hate food when I was 15.
No - that's not entirely true. I didn't teach myself anything, I just learnt it... somehow, I learnt to hate food.


I was asked in an interview last week: What makes you angry?
I made up some "excellent interview answer" bullshit with a fake smile on my face. But the truth is, food makes me angry.
I have to move seats on the train when someone in my view is eating a McDonalds out of a brown paper bag. I have to put on my earphones to block out the greasy crunching of crisps from the person sat behind me. The rustling of foil packets or the stench of fried foods makes ME feel gross. I feel so angry and disgusted it makes me want to scream.

But do you know what is really the grossest thing ever? This is the highest figure on the scales I have ever seen in my entire life.
I'm a lump. I'm a thing.

When I lost Alex I let go of everything I had been fighting for. I let all my demons take over. I became everything I loathed. I am everything I hated and despised. I am fat and greasy.
And I Did This.


I had a relationship with a Mr Perfect - top boarding school, flawless grades, star pupil, Senior Prefect, top university, champion cadet, strong athlete and the unequivocal "really nice guy".
And then there was me - an unstable liar, body and mind stuck together with a cheap glue.
I'm not sad that we broke up - I'm sad that I let my dreams and imagination get carried away. He wasn't my ideal man - perfection has no depth or emotion, perfection is plastic. Perfect people are plastic people. Alex was plastic-hearted through and through. He felt nothing, while I felt everything.
I put him into a mould labeled "The Man Who Loves Me" and didn't question if he fitted or not. I convinced myself that it was perfectly alright for me to be crying myself sick on my bedroom floor, unable to lift the phone to hear a caring, loving voice comforting me at the other end. He felt nothing, while I felt everything.

It was four weeks ago when I walked out of my job in the City. I have done nothing productive in this time - I cannot lie - except make my way through all the DVD box sets of Gossip Girl. When I looked at the online prospectus of Yale I was confused - why was everyone in the pictures plain and unattractive? Oh... yes, that's right, I was watching fantasy in Gossip Girl, it is not reality. In the real world, there are very, very few beautiful people. I looked around me today on the bus and train and high street - and I genuinely did not see one person who could be cast on Gossip Girl.

A few posts back, an old blogger, Daisy, made the connection for me. I have always read books or watched film and embedded myself in one fantastical world or another. While my feet stand on the cold, hard land of reality, my head has always been spinning up in the clouds of my imagination. I have never accepted the world in which my feet stood, only the one I dream of standing in.
So like now, I dream that the land of Gossip Girl exists, and I too could prance around beautiful men like a gazelle in designer dresses.
And I have to force myself to accept that my imagination is just that - however vivid and alive it may be, it is not real, it is my imagination. I will not survive if I keep trying to live in it and live up to it.
Do you know, I have spent my whole life trying to be something I am not. and never will be


The fact that I am still talking about Alex and am still haunted by him three months after I last saw or spoke to him goes to show how unable I have been to move on. If I took the job in the investment bank, I'd still be here, living the same life, with the same emptiness, and months later I would still be writing the same old shit. So, I have to get out of London and burn all my bridges. This has been the worst period of my life, and I want to erase every single memory of it.

For whatever I have said about Alex, there's really only one way that I can sum it up. These are my final words on him:
When I was with him, I was happy. Happy in a way I had wished for for so long and happy in a way that I never genuinely believed I deserved. When I was with him I was happy.

He will never know that. He will never know any of what I have written in this blog. Just like every other guy that came before, he will never know.

So I'm uprooting my life and I'm saving it. I'm going to go to work in a boarding school where I will get three meals a day set down in front of me, where I will be around decent, cheerful people, where I will have no temptations to go off the rails, where I will have nobody to put on a show for. I'm getting out of the place that promises dreams and never delivers. I'm getting out of the lifestyle that has ground me down into nothing. Yes, I am running away, but I'm running away to somewhere that promises a healthy and grounded way of life - I'm going back to school - to learn how to be a genuine, honest, loving, decent human being again.

Also:

Thank you for the comments and advice on the last post, I am truly grateful.

I would also like to point you in the direction of a new blogger on the scene who I think is very special: http://ireadabookaday.blogspot.com/

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