� Catharine to me, yesterday afternoon

OK. I have to tidy my room and also pay some bills and figure out my finances and then (obviously) make a trip to the bank before I light out for Cheryl's around six tonight, but I'm letting myself sit and write for a while first. I don't know how anyone with the smallest clue what this kind of writing means to me could ever give me shit about it. Perhaps that's a tangent for another time. If I'd begun an entry yesterday morning, as I'd meant to, it would have started out something like People, people, people! Why do you have to break my heart? When I tell you that I'm thinking about getting my ass in at-long-last gear and applying to MFA programs, I need your response to be a little more supportive than "Hm." Do I ask so much? And by "people," of course, I would have meant "Catharine." Sequence of events was that I talked to her and she hm'd me, I got righteously jacked, I ate some breakfast and did some stuff and went downstairs and got online, where I had mail from her into which she'd copied my P.S. from yesterday and put the subject header on it: "I think so too." Then I fell completely and absolutely apart. The e-mail said lots of other things too, there were words like "worried" and "panic" and the horrible but, I realized, not uncalled-for question whether what I'm putting myself through is worth my strength and my life.

No, it isn't.

Two obvious courses of action present themselves. One is to get far away from the situation of putting oneself through stuff, to concede what pals + family + Rich say is true and make a clean break or take the pre-emptive strike or whatever you want to call it. And some of my friends seem to be getting increasingly exasperated with me that I can't do that. To be fair, if I had a friend who was my kind of paralyzed and seemed to have hitched her wagon to a scar, after a while I'd get annoyed too. I suppose I would see someone who had it within her power to change a bad situation and contrarily, maybe even ostentatiously, was refusing to do it. I am sorry for how what I'm putting myself through becomes something that puts my friends through something else � believe me, I'm sorry, and embarrassed as well � but I can't give up. I love Todd and I will until I don't anymore. He's all the best adjectives and the sight of him still makes me swoon and there's no one I've ever met whom I would rather be with. To walk away would be to pretend that those things aren't true. I was posting some of the old Monitor entries today from last fall when we were first getting to know each other, and one thing that I was writing about was how fiercely I needed, this time, not to pretend, and how committed I was to the scary project for Todd's sake � that he was the one who made me want to tell the truth not only to him but to myself. I can't even imagine what a wreck I'm going to be if he ends up dumping me, especially for someone else (because that would mean that he lied about what the DL was for, that he was pretending), but I'll deal with that if and as I have to. Also, he's not a bad person, he's not a shit: I know this. I don't know yet whether he's a pretender. I was feeling nostalgic, protective of the person who wrote those old entries. I admired her so much for not chickening out and for recognizing that there were people who were worth the exact opposite of chickening out, and here one was. I didn't chicken out then and I am not going to now. The Todd of last fall � and, in the reposting, we're still in the NBC stage of the game � is who made me want to be the non-chicken, unpretending, *true* version of myself, my best and greatest self. The main reason it sucks that he was reading my diary all that time is that that's where I was working those things out, practicing for real life, leaving detritus behind. I don't demean the Monitor at all when I say that one of the many fuctions it served was that of a kind of emotional blotter. It made me a better person, but you know what they say about laws and sausages? Same thing. I didn't know. I didn't know so much. But I knew and have always known what it was I wanted. So on the one hand the idea that I really want to date impeccably mannered grad students is maybe even more absurd than you thought it was, the DL is even more of a farce or a comic opera, but on the other you see that giving up now would involve about five kinds of betrayal and that one of them would be self-renunciation. I won't do that.

(Tangent on "great": when I talked to him last weekend he'd just watched "Iris" and was full of all kinds of noxious silly crap about me being the Iris Murdoch and him being, well, you see where this is going. Line, actual: "I see greatness in you." Now when I say this next part you must understand that I am speaking in the voice of the atheist Eagle Scout whom I quoted in the last entry and not as Bette Midler singing "Wind Beneath My Wings": to the extent that I have that, to the extent that I have anything at all, where the hell does he think I got it? I got it in large part because other people, my friends, believed that I could and made me believe it too. What, I live in a fucking vacuum here?)

So Plan B. Plan B is what I did yesterday afternoon after an intense flurry of e-mail with Catharine � I called a therapist-referral service and have an appointment on Monday evening. Voila! How it works is I meet with someone who then gives me the names and numbers of three local mental-health professionals she thinks will fit with my preferences (a behavioral approach, no New Agey stuff or spirituality) and requirements (evening appointments), and then I have an hour with each of them and I pick one and she and I will go to work on my sick little head. Because frankly I just can't hold myself together anymore. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel, admitting that, and also admitting it in my diary for the delectation of strangers and strange lawyers and, eventually, whoever is the first Amazon employee to stumble upon this motherlode. I didn't know, yesterday, whether I would admit it at all. And I don't know how easy I'm resting with the fact that I've done so. But intellectually I see that it is cuckoo that I'm in this state of paralysis, like I feel like I can't *act* until I know the outcome of the DL and nothing can coexist with it because that would imply that I'm ignoring its gravity and not taking it seriously enough, part of me has to beat myself and eat myself up over it 24-7 or else I will not have deserved to have it end well for me and if it ends badly that will be my fault. And the thing is, I'm not even like that, the person who worries and cries like this is temporarily my authentic self, sure, but she is also an alien. That Saturday night in the kitchen when I said to Julian that Todd was an idiot if he thought he could do better, all the times my chick friends have said You are a wonderful broad who deserves to be happy, sometimes deploying some choice adjectives of their own, and I have agreed � well, I wasn't pretending then, either. I know the objective facts: I'm smart and good lookin' and funny and the no-job thing should be treated as a pain in the ass until I find a new one, which if I would let myself borrow some mental energy from DL-obsessing-about to look for on a regular basis would not be all that long. I write reasonably well and read a lot and I don't believe that either of these things makes me better than anyone else, and everyone I know will back me up on that, even including Rich. If Todd couldn't or wouldn't see, from reading the Monitor, how crazy in love with him I was � Tom declared, a few weeks ago, "He should feel like an island god" � or believe it when I said it, then that's his problem; and, following that logic painfully through, if he does indeed have that problem and can't shake it, then no matter how much it rips my guts out when it does, I will one day be better off for not having made it my problem too. As for the other problem, the Jealous one, I never gave him anything to be jealous of, and I know lots of guys who wouldn't be able to say that about a year's worth of entries secretly read in their girlfriends' hypothetical diaries. I am, however, a work in progress; I am not perfect and neither is he. I worry about not being indie enough, and it's hard for me to assume that people, in meeting me socially, are going to give me the benefit of the doubt. I'm not easy on myself. But give me a break, this is small potatoes. Microscopic potatoes! I *am* great, thank you for noticing. So why am I wasting my life and my strength and my time and my money crying, miserable, in constant self-abnegating agony over something that will either resolve itself the way I want it to or in not doing so will definitively establish that I'm better off without what I thought I wanted? I don't know and am not getting any closer to an answer. Time to call in a professional, is all. I was going to type No shame in that and then realized that there's at least part of me that doesn't believe that; I do feel ashamed that I haven't been able to get the DL off my back all by myself or to separate the DL from everything else in my life that it's choking and holding beneath the surface and, OK, Catharine: killing. But it is, and the same way that chickening out would be a denial of everything that's great or potentially great in me, a self-excommunication, I owe it to my idea of the DL to try to help it and get back on track. (Note: Do not read the previous statement as me blaming myself for anything.) And this needs to be my first priority for a while, and if that means holing up and not even trying to temp for a week or whatever, so be it, I'll figure out the money situation. Thank you for asking me so baldly, Catharine: it's not worth my life.

If I get dumped, I get dumped. And then I'll read and write and cook and bake bread for my friends and become a movie- and book-reviewing machine, except of course not a *machine*-machine because that would be bad. I'll go see bands by myself if I have to. I'll write in my diary, which some people (you?) will be very happy about. I'll get a job and make the best of it. My hair will get long and pretty and I'll take terrific care of myself, training for a half-marathon with Cheryl in the spring rather than in a month (which is smarter anyway), and I will be the furthest thing from one of those party-girl happy hour habitu�s who's going to start looking her age in about ten minutes, and the same people who used to say I was hot still will. I'll send letters to my friends, go visit PA and New York, and maybe, after I get my act more together which may be by the spring and maybe not, maybe I will apply to some strain of grad school, but not as a distraction from myself. I'll refinish furniture and sew clothes and have dinner parties. And one distant day, even though my standards will then be post-heartbreak even higher and even though the very thought makes me sick to my stomach right now, I will meet some other guy whom I could consider dating and he will find me considerable too and after a while I won't miss Todd so much and in general, eventually I will be fine. Of course right now I don't actually believe that any of this would come to pass � I'm making things up and saying what I know I'm supposed to be saying. That is the therapist's job, to show me how to say it and have it be true.

Tonight it's the Long Winters show with Vanessa and Popeye and man oh man do I ever need a Long Winters show after the last few days. I sort of want to drink my face off, but how badly I want to seems like a warning sign, so I'll be good and drive from Cheryl's then ferry my homies home. Last night Rebecca and Julian and I went to the Ballard Halloween thing. We saw a very fine headbanging band, a Queen cover band, some good costumes, a fire-eater, and hide nor hair of Todd with a date, which had been a distinct possibility and now that I think of it I guess is even money tonight too so maybe I should reconsider my decision to remain ambulatory... kidding! I am kidding, people � and by "people," I mean "people" � and you might not believe me but I'm only mildly skeeved out by his whole dating game just *because* of how great I know I am and how, I'm sorry, even your above-average scenester chick is by comparison an average scenester chick indeed. It's true the tits have shrunk from all the running, but the legs look better than ever, and the non-superficial rest is, bar none, un-candle-hold-to-able. And that's a fact.

See how schizo I am, though, just in the last two paragraphs? It's no joke, I'm a mess. But not for too much longer, I hope.