I thought about the last few years. Something has changed, and one of the biggest things is that I stopped being very emotionally involved with people.
It is an exaggeration to say that I no longer have a friend in this world, but it's true that I haven't really taken the hard work to hang our with my friends.
I also think about my love life. There's not really been anything. The first phase was when women were untouchable and unreachable. I hadn't really known how to approach them, and they were painfully awkward years.
The second phase was when I was emotionally involved with a girl for the first time. And some of the moments were probably good (probably because I don't really remember.) The term didn't really exist in those days, but I was very likely the victim of narcissist abuse.
The third phase was when I still hung out with that girl, and I thought we were going to be “friends”. But I've come to realise that some of it was that I didn't want to lose her company, and some of it was that I still harboured the hope of getting into her ass. Time went on and it slowly dawned on me that
The prospects of consensual sex were very dim.
She was a bitch and I was wasting time with her.
We were growing apart. You could go along with anybody you found attractive when you were a teenager, but when you grow older, you'll know each other better and the differences will start to matter. I started to see more clearly that the person that she really was was really getting on my nerves. She was studying things that did not have a strong relationship with reality – an incredible amount of postmodernist mumbo jumbo.
We started getting contemptuous of each other, and eventually I made the decision to ghost her, which was quite easy because at that point I was mainly the one initiating contact. To be honest, I ghosted her because it was the one thing I could think of doing that would piss her off the most.
And as time went on, I didn't just ghost her, I promised myself that I would not talk to her, ever (it was surprisingly easy to keep this promise) and I would not hold on to any memory of the time that we had together. It would be like “Sunshine of the Eternal Mind”, when a person wiped his memory of an unhappy relationship. It brought me a peace of mind that I hadn't had for ages, at least since my adolescence. And I wasn't totally unaware of it, but every time I took out pictures of Japanese gravure models to get myself off to, I was emotionally distancing myself from women by reducing them to sex objects (and getting an hour of fun while I was doing it.) If my love life was a cute furry animal, this was a conscious decision on my part to strangle the life out of it, and also inflict the same kind of abuse on my own privates.
The fourth phase was when I finally got my freedom back and I loved not having around so much that I didn't look for a girlfriend for the longest time. After a few more years, I ended up living in Mexico and that probably killed the prospect of me finding a girlfriend. Life was great.... up till the point when it was not.
I've now realised that that was very short sighted. When you are older, that is when you need the most the girlfriend that you met when you were young. My entire youth had gone by without me being in a proper relationship, and I had missed that rite of passage. I spent half an hour at the public piano, bashing out song after song. It happens very rarely but I did have one or two people clapping for me. That's me, reaping the reward as an old man, for what I did as a young man. Maybe I should have gone through the ordeal of having a girlfriend. Your happiness level outside of a relationship is a 5. Your happiness level in a relationship is somewhere between 0 and 10.
So while I'm happy that I got myself a peace of mind after emotionally distancing myself from that girl, I'm wondering if this is filtering into my contempt for the opposite sex. And while wiping my memory of all the good and bad things that took place was good in the short run, I wonder if it would have cost me in the long run.