September 23rd, 1981

The soap opera with David continues. He didn’t call last night or today. It’s now 10:30– I just got home from a meeting at St. Luke’s— and I called him. He’s not in. During the past 2 months I have talked to David nightly. I know his daily routine. His schedule. I know that he’s out. And, knowing that he doesn’t hang out in bars– I strongly suspect he’s seeing someone. That really angers me– annoys me. He’s playing his little girl role to someone else’s boy. I don’t even like David. he’s not the kind of hard-core, blood and guts personality that I’ve always been seduced by. He’s a naive little sissy.

So, all at once, I am guilty, confused, hurt and angry. Mostly angry at myself for being in this situation– for allowing this to happen.

So what’s left now? Just me again. And my dog, and my job and my meetings.

During the meeting tonight I realized with great clarity that underlying and undermining my entire existence is an unfathomable well of self-hatred. Six months of sobriety has slowly stripped away a few layers of bullshit– accumulated layers of self-image, fantasy, personality. I’ve been getting closer to the truth– the primal force that shapes all my experience and perceptions. It’s like lifting off a scan that has covered the central, mortal wound carried through my life since childhood. Beneath that scan is a horrifying, roaring, monstrous, endless pit of self-hatred– raging like a scene from hell. It remains buried under years of lies and drunken self-image, distortion, grandiosity and egotism. I despise myself. That’s what I cannot share at meetings. That’s why I cannot write. That’s why my life is strewn with the debris of two month affairs. That’s why I choke myself on three packs of cigarettes a day. That’s why I drank and drugged myself into oblivion every day for eleven years. Sweet oblivion. That center– that black, calming center where the pain stops. Where I stop. Cease to be. I seek oblivion because I do not want to be. It hurts to be me, because I hate myself so utterly.