I don’t have an addictive personality.

(I mean, I definitely hovered dangerously on the alcoholic line, but I feel like I got over it before it got me too hard.)

What I have is a history of poor decisions, and weak decisions, and retracted decisions. It’s my dark underbelly, under the intimidating façade I wear. It’s the reason my sister can call me and talk about a hippy ceremony of burning sage to let things go and make me cry at work in my office at 12:40 in the afternoon. It’s the reason why I can’t get out of bed, and the reason why I’ve been hiding from my friends and my potential friends for so long.

The fact that I’m intimidating kindof blows my mind. I can’t figure out how it started, though it’s probably some residual leftover of trying to not care that people made fun of me growing up. It seems like a cruel turn of events that the guard I built up to make it so I could handle people making fun of me is why people hate me. Not because I do mean things, or act out against them, but because I don’t react, or react too logically, or whatever. And people do hate me. They “unfriend” me on Facebook. They threaten me with hammers or contact my boyfriend’s exes to form an allegiance against me. They accuse me of making excuses all the time or of ruining people they know. They tell me they’d rather be with their other friends, because I’ll always be there, or because I’m not fun enough.

(Note: sometimes I am mean, and push people’s buttons, or lie, or tease. I’m not pretending I’m perfect here, but I don’t think it explains the hating phenomenon.)

I do make excuses all the time, though. I’ve burned a lot of bridges with my passivity. I’ve wasted a lot of time by not being honest with myself and others. I’ve wasted a lot of time avoiding the things I am honest with myself and others about.

Worse, most people don’t even bother hating me. I’m just an obstacle in their way of getting to what they want. What I have to say is what they have to listen to before they can talk. So I don’t talk to many people.

My sister says that my image of myself is awful, that my low self esteem and poor confidence is unfounded and bordering on dismorphism. But I do feel fat, and I do feel unattractive, and like people don’t like me and couldn’t like me and wouldn’t like me, and I am tired, and many people do make me feel awful about myself.

I just always end up alone in my dreams. Alone, on a stormy seaside, with a large bright kitchen and a cat. But at least in my dreams I’m content.