The last few months have been difficult. Every time I go to write something, it’s just a reminder of the fact that nothing in my life has changed. I’m still hopelessly single, completely unemployable, living with my family, overweight, and have no friends. The only thing that’s changed in my life is that I have started taking up old lady hobbies to fill my time and try to add some meaning to my life. The answer to life’s problems is not in needlepoint, counted cross-stitch, or knitting. I’m just stuck in this ditch on the side of the road alone. I apply for jobs and don’t even get a response now. I try working out to lose weight so even if I never have anyone in my life, or a job, and get taken to prison for failure to pay $30,000 in student loans for a degree that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, I won’t be the fattest, whitest girl in prison and the next day I’m too sore to even walk up a flight of stairs. It just seems like I am completely failing at every aspect of this life thing. I don’t even have any friends. All of my former class mates are texting our group chat with exciting updates and pictures from their jobs and all I have to show for my life is how much my highlights have grown out and faded because I don’t have the money to get my hair done or even cut. I can’t even leave the group chat because they will just add me back – I’ve tried in the past and it hasn’t worked. Seeing them talk about the various aspects of their jobs just reminds me of the fact that I don’t have anything to talk about. I keep listening to “The Goodbye Song” from the canceled NBC drama Smash on repeat over and over again because it sounds like how my soul feels. They are working and living on their own and living up to the expectations everyone has set for them. All I ever do is fall short. A few weeks ago, I went with my family to a viewing area that was directly on the eclipse path and watched the eclipse with one of my mom’s sisters. That was the highlight of my August. The eclipse was an incredible thing to witness. It was a natural phenomenon that seemed to unite the country in a weird way. Despite all the problems facing the country on that day, they all fell aside for that brief minute. That was an incredible thing to witness and I understand why my mother and people in her generation so distinctly and fondly remember the eclipse in the ‘70’s. As incredible as it was, it was the only thing I did in August. I didn’t do anything else of remote significance for the entire month. Not for lack of trying – I applied for a large number for jobs but somehow these employers are able to see the truth about me just from my resume – that I am a complete and total loser who will only disappoint them. There are some truths in this life that are undeniable – the sun will rise every morning and set every evening, dog people and cat people will never agree, and I, Sarah Dodson, am a complete and total loser and will disappoint every person who believes in me for even a moment. I don’t mean to be such a loser – somehow it just happened. I had such lofty dreams and too much ambition for a single person to have so I never realized that I was a loser until it was too late to fix. Now I’m just stuck here. I will end up dying old and alone, unloved, not having achieved anything in my life. That’s the opposite of what I wanted. When I was little, I didn’t dream of being an actor or rockstar the way most children do. I just wanted to not end up alone. I naively thought that would be easy. I thought that I would meet a nice guy and have friends and it would work out because I was a nice person. I cared about other people and thought I was at the very least mildly amusing. I never really knew what I wanted to do but I thought I’d at least have minimal success because I was fairly smart – not a genius by any means but I picked up on things pretty quickly and had a decent memory. Stupidly, I set myself up to become the biggest loser of them all. John Lennon wrote “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans” and it’s true. Life just ran me over and beat me down while I was thinking I had it figured out. Even through what could only be thought of as the worst of times – when my parents were going through a terribly messy divorce – I still thought that life would have to balance out eventually. My father was emotionally abusive for years and then replaced me when he started his new family with his secretary/mistress of 10+ years. And when I told him I didn’t want him in my life, he didn’t understand why and continued to use me and my siblings as chess pieces for years to try and hurt my mother. It didn’t hurt her – it hurt me. In all that mess and heartache I still thought that my life would eventually work out. With a little time, I would be able to get everything I ever wanted. Cosmically it would even out because of karma and all that stuff. I had my garbage, life changing moment so it would all work out now. I thought I was on that path, but now it turns out I wasn’t. Because now I’m lost in the middle of nowhere. They don’t make road maps or even have mile markers for life. When you get lost, all you have are your instincts and intuition to guide yourself. If I haven’t made it clear already, I seem to be lacking in those departments.
The five steps of grief are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. I don’t really know what stage I’m in but what prompted this long rambling was some kind of shift in this scale for grieving the loss of my hopes and dreams. At the end of August, my 16-year old sister had her second micro discectomy and was diagnosed with early onset degenerative disc disease, which in it of itself is state altering enough. But the thing that really got me was that her boyfriend, who is also just 16, has given up an incredible amount of time to sit at her bedside both in the hospital and at our house with me and our mother watching their almost every move all because he cares an incredible amount for her. I don’t think I’ve ever had someone in my life who has cared about me that much, outside of my family of course. That’s what did me in. Realizing that I’ve never been that close to anyone in 22 years and she’s done it in just 16 has just cemented the fact that it probably won’t ever happen for me. My mother tells me that I’ll meet someone – I just need to move to an area with more like-minded people. It makes sense in theory. But at my age, my mother had been engaged for a year and was only a few months away from marrying my father. And before she met my father, she had already had at least three serious relationships. The closest thing I have to a relationship is my growing infatuation with Tim Daly (which is absolutely worthy of it’s own essay and probably indicative of my mental issues and need for therapy). It’s not for lack of trying. Just like my job search, my efforts to meet someone are fruitless. I even joined a few dating apps and it’s just pathetic. The few people I match with don’t even contact me after we match. I even message them first and still nada. It just cements the fact that I will just end up alone, which just makes me sad. The one thing I’ve never wanted is to be alone. Yet somehow everything in my life has led me to be alone or just reminds me of the fact that I am. This all then culminates in crying breakdowns that last for hours while I’m hiding from my family in the middle of the night; and then I wake up with a terrible headache and a massive amount of eye boogies in the morning. I don’t know what will change the fact that I’m a lonely loser. At this point it seems that all I know is that it needs to change because eye boogies are just gross.