Panic Room
Gentle readers, I'm about to send you on the rollercoaster that is my emotional life. Six Flags ain't got nuthin' on me. I suggest you strap in very, very tightly and still I know I may lose some of you.

Well, I asked her to email me, and she did. She's beginning with a introductory "hello in response to" type of message. She also included her phone number and a picture file which my poor sad computer could not open. (Application line says it's a Mac file). She did this yesterday, a day after I asked her to.

Then the agoraphobic woke up on the Empire State Building's scaffold.

Let me just tell you the first few thoughts that crashed into my head when I saw it.
"Oh no, she's writing to you ALREADY!!!!!!!"
"She put her TELEPHONE NUMBER in the message!!!! That means she wants you to CALL her!!! But I told her I'm better with the written word than spoken!!!"
"She called me on Valentine's Day because she was thinking romantic thoughts and she wants a relationship with me!!!!!"
"But she has two children and I'm not ready to be a father!!!!! I'm not even ready to be a husband!!!!!"

Is that sad, or what? Yeah, well try being me.

And these thoughts didn't come alone. They came with sweatty palms and racing pulse. They came with a sense of dread and panic that I am fairly sure doesn't happen to ordinary men.

At this rate, I'll be alone for the rest of what is left of my life.

Oh, AND I had a diner cheeseburger, fries, and cheesecake last night. It's called BINGE.

Yes, I will go to the gym today, and yes I went three times last week, and yes I walked about 100 blocks in the past five days, so yes I'm not utterly out of control, but dang. If blogging doesn't work, then I'm going to have to get some more therapy.

Okay, so this is what I know so far;
I catastrophize, ie, my mind jumps to the worst possible case scenario. It does this like a reflex, whether I want it to or not. But it doesn't do this all the time. Else I'd never have moved to NYC, and done all the other things I've managed to accomplish.

Conditioning could help me dull this tendency to a nagging feeling instead of panic.

Self-education can remind me that it is a disorder, not the truth.

(little voice right now saying, "but what if but what if but what if")
(No, not a real voice, but a feeling so vivid it seems like a voice.)

Okay, first thing to do, thank her for writing...no, FIRST thing to do is take my blog address off my e-mail signature!!!!! Then send her a thanks. I'm not going to call her though. I'm going to keep writing instead. She'll prabably call me though, and maybe she'll see that I write better than I talk, and she'll let me stick to the e-mails.

Okay.

Okay.

(gosh, before the "okay"s I had just zoned out, staring, envisioning where ths could go, and I forgot to breathe.)

Saidy, I gotta hand it to you, that post you made about men being the New Females was hilarious and is all I can think about right now. I feel like I'm acting like a woman. Ordinary men don't deliberate so about this stuff. They just move in for the nookie and damn the consequences. But here I am worrying mostly about how far into this I'll get, and then what will happen when the dread takes over and I run away, and what happens then to her and her two little boys. How they'll feel when I screw it up again. How frustrated she'll grow towards the end when I begin dropping important cues, like not returning phone calls and staying out of touch for days at a time. Well, in that I'm not like a woman at all, am I? All Man, baby, yeah!


blehhhhhh


I'm going to go to the gym now. Maybe I'll freaking WALK there. It's only 123 blocks away.

Me at 2/16/2004 09:18:00 AM

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