slow descent into alcoholism

i don't understand alcoholism. i don't know what it is but the idea of using alcohol as some sort of crutch is just so far out of my frame of reference. i've self-diagnosed myself with an addictive personality but i can't picture myself abusing alcohol. maybe its because i only currently drink socially and maybe its because alcohol usually just makes me sleepy but i can't see any way for me to do it. i think i have to many hang-ups around booze. like the idea of drinking alone seems like the saddest thing. like if i'm drinking alone to get drunk i've already lost so many battles to get there that the alcoholism is probably just one of any number of concurrent problems

doing unpleasant stuff

so i've put off doing something unpleasant for the last few weeks like i do and now i have officially run out of time. i wish i wasn't like this but its hard to change. i'm trying to be a better person who owns his mistakes and hopefully learns from them and finds ways to improve but this is difficult (like duh).

i feel scared and intimidated and in over my head. scared that i am going let myself, and maybe more importantly, others, down. i think that's what's the source of my procrastination. i would rather not play the game than try and be found wanting, which is a big fear of mine, that I am a fraud, an unambitious slacker jerk who wont amount to much and everybody will find out.

this project is so big and has so many future potential ramifications for job opportunities that i am terrified of failing. i'm working with a partner and she is so amazing and intelligent and just so profoundly curious about everything and engaging and successful that it is intimidating. i know we are nominally equal partners but its like there is such a gap between our levels of experience that i don't know what i have to contribute which makes me feel like a fraud pretending at intelligence and its only a matter of time before she finds out how useless i can be. do you know how much xbox i have played over the last three weeks? how many episodes of breaking bad and cougar town i have watched? its gross. i know comparing myself to others is unproductive but i can't help but feel that i come up wanting.

i know i have some baseline intelligence. i go to a good school, i can get good grades on my papers, i am the "smart one" in my group of friends but my lack of ambition is worries me. not that i have any burning need to go to law school or enter the corporate world or whatever but i know there are careers that i would like to enter but i don't have any concrete way to achieve these murky long term goals. i don't work well with the long term, everything i do is in the short term. trying ti plan more than three weeks out terrifies me, like acknowledging that i have some say in the way the universe unfolds around me.

so this project: its huge, bigger than anything i have ever done before, the kind of project that will result in real world tangible results (or as tangible as anything on the internet can be) and lead to job opportunities or at the very least a nice line on my cv or w/e and my approach this whole time has been to retreat and pretend like nothing is going on. i don't know how to deal. i want to be successful, a lot of my self-image is invested in this succeeding but i don't know how to make it happen and my first instinct is to lean heavily on my partner but what kind of image does that project? So i've been ignoring the issue for the last four weeks, all of the winter holiday basically and now i have this class tomorrow and its not like i can avoid this any longer and i will somehow have to justify my awol period. and you know me i am no good at lying or making excuses so what am i going to do? sorry, felt like taking it easy for a few weeks now lets get crackin!

i am trying to imagine the worst case scenario so as to prepare myself and i think my worst fear is that this episode has revealed me to my partner as the flaky, unreliable, commitment-phobic person that i am and that our working relationship will be strained from here on out. but then i spend most of my time in my head which can be a horrible echo chamber of horrors sometimes where slight transgressions get amplified (i wrote amplified not magnified to keep with the echo chamber metaphor - will you have noticed this in the future???) into gigantic mistakes. the first thing to remember is that things are almost never as bad as you imagine them to be: what for you is reasonable grounds for a ritualized japanese style suicide, barely registered with anyone else. people are self absorbed right? am i rationalizing? because of course sometimes things are a actually a hundred times worse than you imagined and then you are a real knob because you've spent all this time prepping your doomsday plan only to discover you weren't even in the right ballpark in terms of apocalypse scenarios.

so so so i guess what i'm mostly worried about at this very moment is less the damage (if any) that i have done to my future hypothetical career and more to the damage i've done to how my partner perceives me. has this whole thing been a weird passive aggressive thing? i wish my primary response to external pressure was not to shut down. given the choice between fight and flight i grow wings every time which makes it hard to deal with problems. small problems become big problems when mixed with inaction.

so maybe thats what my new years resolution should be: act more, react less.

ugh i've just been feeling so inadequate to everything lately. taking care of business, myself, others, whatever i just don't feel up to it, which is dumb, though still true probably. i was hoping this piece would act as some catharsis and i guess i feel a little bit better.

it's such a simple thing: check your school email dummy what is the worst thing that could possibly have happened? if something was really major she had other ways to contact you so what could you have missed? i wish ignoring my email inbox was not so fucking easy. fuuuck.