J’s Diary Entry

Monday, 15 May 1995

Just figured out I was snubbed on Friday night.  I was not invited for Friday drinks on purpose.  Jeremy blabbed.  Well, not really blabbed, but he made it obvious.  I was at the printer, and he asked me if I went straight home on Friday.  I said yes, and he said something about how he had a few drinks.  Then Quinn walked past me, and I think he signalled to Julian from behind me to shut up, because Jeremy went strangely silent and became absorbed in looking at his desk.  Cav gave me a funny look this morning too.  I think that was because when I was photocopying my clippings, I walked around the back of Caleb’s old desk to ask  Nathan for the pen I usually borrow from Quinn or Cav.  I sort of knew they didn’t ask me on purpose all weekend, but it didn’t really bother me until now.  Maybe it’s because I think they like Jeremy or whoever better than me.  It kinda hurts, I feel rejected – I actually really did like these people.  I really did.  I guess it shows that I can dish it out, but can’t take it.  How many times have I slagged off people behind their back with mocking superiority?  All of this seems so petty, borrowing a pen from one person instead of another… I think I even knew at Friday lunch that I wouldn’t be invited.  Cav was really derisive when I said I was giving up “drinking and all earthly pleasures”.  He said something along the lines of “What, do you want to shrivel up altogether?”  I guess I do.  I guess I’ve become boring to them, bleating out the same old whinges week after week.  I still feel shitty though.  Fuck ’em.  That’s how I alternately feel – “Fuck ’em” and “I wish I was dead.”  I feel determined to never go drinking with them again, but I know that’s snotty, and that people we’ve (I’ve) snubbed before, like Nathan and Jeremy, are more magnanimous than that.  I was feeling so good this morning too.  I walked all the way to the Royal Melbourne Hospital.  I was going to binge on chocolate and even went so far as to buy a block of Lindt, but it’s yucky. Some sort of caramel liqueur flavour.

Parts of me want to be strong and say “Fuck ’em, I don’t need anybody, I don’t want anybody,” but I’m trying to get away from that sort of destructive thinking.  I want to be able to be at ease with the fact that there are certain needs that I have that make me less than completely independent from all other life forms.  That is an absolute I can’t live up to, I need other people around me – humans are gregarious.  This isolation thing I’ve been doing for the last fifteen months or so has done me no good.  I’m getting fit now because I want to re-enter society feeling unashamed of myself.  And now that I’m doing something about my physical state, I get this awful knock on a personal level.  I need to get better at handling rejection, that seems to be at the root of so much of this malaise.  Fear of, and a poor reaction to, rejection is an extension of poor self esteem I suppose.  I need a bit more resilience.  God, I feel like going home and curling up with a bottle of vodka, I really do.  But alcoholism is one vice I can do without.  I really want to give up booze and B’s for a good few months.  Long enough so that I know it’s not just a hiatus, I want control back in that respect – I don’t want to be some fifty-year-old trying to ween himself off the bottle on doctor’s orders.

I guess I can’t make people like me.

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