#7: Pathologize Me, Daddy

How much healing is too much healing?

Welcome to edition #7 of Hot Girl Gothic. If you missed edition #6, the one where I define limerence and sue my Current Romantic Obsession, check back in your email (spam and promotions too) and mark it as important, or click here. Tell a friend! xo

I am trying to heal but I am finding it stupid. I know I’ve hit rock bottom when I wake up with the memory of googling “Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings in New York City”. Though sometimes it shocks me that I would ever consider myself a sex and love addict, somehow, bi-annually, after I stay up crying over a text message one too many nights in a row, I’m bebopping into Google as if I’ve been diagnosed!

Finding an SLAA meeting is like picking a sorority; each chapter has totally different vibes. It’s social suicide to choose the wrong one, so I spend hours pouring over each of the chapters’ little websites. I end up picking one at random, because if they do have different vibes, their websites suck at storytelling them, and I enter my email into a vibeless Google Form asking for contact information. 

All of their meeting rooms look like this one. Why? Do we all snuggle up on the couch? Seems counterproductive!

Then I fall asleep for 11 hours, and the next day, I carry on as if nothing has happened because 1. The morning version of myself does not associate with the night version and 2. These chapters always ghost me! This seems particularly cruel to do as an organization serving sex and love addicts!

But even if they did text me back, I would never actually go to a meeting because I am not, in fact, a sex and love addict; I am just insane.

But then again, I don’t KNOW! This list looks like my weekly to-do list! Could I imagine a Tuesday afternoon without confusing love with the need to be rescued? Or a misty Friday evening without being immobilized by romantic obsession? What is this, prohibition?!

So maybe I am a sex and love addict by this diagnostic criteria. What now? Certainly I should be researching the ethics of this organization before I leave all my daydreams at their door. Who is the ringleader of this twelve-step shebang? I’ll tell you, it’s the Catholic Church! And baby, I’ve done the research, and it is not all fun and games regarding sexual liberation over there!

SLAA is just very confusing. First of all, they have made it very difficult to tell the difference between a sex and love addict and an ARTIST with a penchant for the DRAMATIC! Like at least three of these criteria are mandatory to receive your BFA in Acting. And yes, I am experiencing a lot of suffering, but many of my favorite authors, poets, and friends are also suffering thus. Can all deep feeling be pathologized into the terms of addiction? Is that always helpful?

I know for some people it can be, but there is danger in categorizing love as a substance, like alcohol, and in reducing deep feelings to symptoms.

Second of all, famously, I am a girl. So many areas of my life are held together by fantasy and falsity and fabricated love. If I pull at the thread of fantasy when it comes to romantic obsession, I fear my whole life will unravel!

I have spent a week of midnights caressing my iPhone, searching to see if SLAA could fix me and my limerence problem. All I got was a moral conundrum about the chronic pathologization of women’s survival skills, a newfound gratitude for nihilism, an increased awareness of my deep loneliness, and this lousy t-shirt!

Ok we weren’t married in real life but in my mind it was sooo real

Still, I want it so much, for some guru to tell me my longing is an addiction, or an illness, or fate’s cruel hands, or anything that indicates it’s some sick evil outside of myself. This is why I keep googling these damn meetings! One of the core tenets of SLAA is “accepting powerlessness” over your addiction. Once you accept that, you can “give it over to God”. Doesn’t that sound so hot? Surrender. Give it to me, oh baby, I want it.

But I don’t believe in God. And I don’t believe in my own powerlessness, try as I may. My greatest and grossest desire is to be able to finally put up my hands and say to someone, “Okay. I’m yours. I’ll do whatever you want. If you’ll just love me.” But this fantasy of surrender is only mine. I cast, script, and shoot it. I build my Current Romantic Obsession from the ground up. I am the only God here. But in this God, I DO NOT TRUST.

This is my official cease and desist to myself.

We established last week that my Current Romantic Obsession deserves incarceration, or whatever the leftist version is, for not loving me enough to bend space, time, and fantasy. Ugh, boys, right! But I sued him over that last week. With that being done, I intended to go from being obsessed with him to being obsessed with healing. 

But how am I supposed to heal when I have tied everything in my life to this fantasy?

THINGS I HAVE RUINED, an incomplete list:

ALL MUSIC: I can twist any song to be about him. Today I listened to the Original Broadway Cast recording of The Drowsy Chaperone and pretended it was about us.

WALKS: No! These are all too reminiscent of last week’s Daily Obsession Parades!

EATING: NO COMMENT

SITTING ALONE IN MY APARTMENT: To do what? Apply for a JOB? Organize? Bake a pie? Adopt a cat? Who do you think I am?

In So Sad Today, Melissa Broder says that being druggily obsessed with another person is not so much about that person as it is about old pain. I wonder if this could, perhaps, be why I’ve been in so much pain! I have clarity about this for one fleeting moment and then I think about him again, old pain, my boyfriend. I think I can make this work. Then I think I am so stupid. Then I think about introducing him to my friends.

“This is my boyfriend, Old Pain. He’s from Old Pain. For work, he is old pain. Sometimes, on the weekends, he’s old pain. When I dream of him, he’s in the shape of someone I could love. But every time I touch him, I just feel old pain.”

I wish knowing he is Old Pain made me less obsessed with him. I wish I believed in a greater narrative, a personal god, or signs. But when I believe in signs, the signs always say “it’s him, it’s now, it’s you, it’s this, it’s happening!!” and they never, not once, have said “temperance, temperance, temperance, temperance, go to sleep, send an email, clean your apartment”.

I wish I knew the difference between a moment and a monument.

And sometimes I do! Sometimes it’s easy not to think of him, like when I think of HIM THE ACTUAL PERSON, or see a picture of HIM, or read a text HE sent me. The reality of HIM THE ACTUAL PERSON is not “addictive”. It’s not even a part of this story. It’s not relevant.

It’s not HIM that I love, but the peripheral him, the version that lives only in my mind, face always obscured, like when you think of an apple but you’re not sure if you’re actually seeing an image of an apple or if you’re just seeing darkness in the shape of an apple. 

I know these things, I am writing them down, I have these moments of clarity, but they just aren’t sticky enough. They don’t accumulate. I go to sleep clear and I wake up foggy. I heal and then unheal and heal and unheal and heal and unheal until I kill a bug and go to sleep again. This cycle sounds… familiar, doesn’t it?

Wow, look at this psychotic drawing someone made. Not me

IT’S THE HOT GOTH CYCLE! We all remember her, the idea that life is just going from Hot to Goth to Hot to Goth over and over again. We go to The Party just to leave The Party, from party to party, til death. Here’s a refresher on our Hot Girl Gothic doctrine, if you need it.

But the Hot Goth Cycle operates in different scales, different scopes. There’s the normal version, the Meso Hot Goth Scale, the one that we usually talk about when we talk Hot Goth Cycle. This is when you feel pretty Hot for a few days, but you party too hard, or take too many risks, so you have a Hot overdose and then you’re Goth again. It’s not a science (or is it), but we’re usually looking at a scale of days, or weeks. 

Then there’s a more Macro Hot Goth Scale, dealing with years at a time. Perhaps you consider, with a broad brush, middle school to be Goth, because you were bullied and alone on Tumblr and yes hot things were happening all the time, but using the Macro Hot Goth Scale, it all looks Goth from here. 

The Mega Hot Goth Scale would be your whole life. You’re born, you enter The Party (what could be hotter than living?) and then, as you get older, you begin to go Goth, and you die. You leave The Party. Hot Goth Cycle completed.

But when you can only look through the Micro Hot Goth Scale, like I’m doing now, it’s maddening. I have moments of perspective. Sometimes hours. I don’t need him. I am Goth. But an hour passes, or 10 minutes, or 30 seconds, and I need him again. Hot. Goth. Hot. Goth. Within a MINUTE. Within a SECOND. I can’t zoom out! I am spinning and spinning and spinning on the Hot Goth Cycle at a shocking rate. 

I’d like it to stop. To cease. What does desist mean? Who could EVER know. No one does.

This is why I am issuing myself, Hot Girl Gothic, a cease and desist. Because I love being Hot and Goth and Hot again, always changing, ever moving. I love being porous and I love being cruel and I love being something incoherent. But right now, I just want to be well. And in Hot Girl Gothic, there is no permanent well. There’s no permanent anything. What kind of system is that?

CEASE! AND DESIST!

I have been served.

To: Maison Kelly

From: Maison Kelly