Relapsing on delusion

It's all in my head and it's worse than drinking

I just like this picture, it has nothing to do with this post

The most coveted party is the one you’re not invited to. Lately, I’ve been thinking about my very human insistence on getting stuck on people, places and things that don’t want me. I know that my primary addiction is technically drinking and I’m in recovery from that but even in sobriety, I indulge in a soul-destroying endeavour of courting rejections. Whether they are direct or just the ones I collect in my head, I have a weakness for that stuff that is probably even more profound than how much I used to enjoy vodka. It boggles me because for someone who tries to live shame-free, I have a propensity for putting myself in situations that create shame, or at least humiliations. 

I met a guy in grade 10. He was cute, goofy and he wore bell bottoms and a crocheted beanie, which I didn’t love but thought of as a bold choice in the sea of Rednecks. I met him at the local bar called The Zoo (yes), where on Diaper Nights (all age nights) he worked as a busboy and an occasional DJ, meaning he lined up songs on CDs (this is in the last century) and pressed Play. But he did sit in that booth, which, I suppose, gave him some status. His name was Jason but his nickname was “Disease,” which both rhymed with his last name and was also in reference to a rumour about Jason being such a slut that he spread STIs. 

Having developed a terrible crush on him, I thought the nickname was mean, totally unjust; this was a small town after all, and people were awful to each other. They were probably jealous of Jason’s success with girls. Because he was very successful with girls, he loved to flirt. (He was dumb as a post. But I didn’t know it.¹) He made them laugh and he had the wettest, most-eyelashed longing brown eyes like Bambi that he would train on a chosen girl. He wasn’t a very deep individual but the silent, romantic stare across the bar made you feel like there was some unexplored depth to Jason, like he was reciting you a poem. 

And once in a while, Jason would train those Bambi eyes on me on Diaper Nights, and he would try to talk to me although most of the time I didn’t understand what he was saying to me as my English was at best rudimentary. It didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter that some nights Jason would ignore me – I liked Jason precisely because Jason ignored me. I was one of the few underage girls on Diaper Night he flirted with, and on more than one occasion, he would be visited by an actual girlfriend. Over the years there were at least three different ones; sophisticated, older girls with teased-up hair and smokes they didn’t steal from their parents, who could order a drink at the bar and who looked down on all the Diaper Night girls trying to get Jason’s attention. 

My crush on Jason was maybe 20 percent Jason and 80 percent of what I imagined Jason was, which was that misunderstood poet with a terrible nickname, who acted like an idiot because deep down inside he was too sensitive for this world, for that bar, for the girls who didn’t know him like I knew him. I spent many days walking around our small town, imagining myself running into Jason, striking up a conversation with Jason… simply meeting Jason out of his bar element and dazzling him with my wit and sense of humour, which he didn’t really experience since there was a language barrier between us. But in my fantasy, I suddenly spoke fluent English and Jason laughed and laughed and laughed and kissed me and then we were married. He didn’t have any diseases, by the way and he really wrote poems; I was right about him the whole time!

I was thinking about Jason recently because Jason is my point of humiliation. He’s the prototype of all the future delusional crushes that happened mainly because I built a fantasy around them and paired with lukewarm interest or outright rejection, turned into situations in which it is inevitable that I will experience shame. But I was thinking about humiliation recently because I tried to understand why I felt so sore and rejected when my last book didn’t make it to the Globe and Mail’s 100 Books of the Year List, where I never cared about that before! 

I know this is not the same as getting romantically rejected, but it definitely has a flavour of wanting to be liked by something that doesn’t like you back. Normally, I never think of those things, I’ve trained myself out of having those expectations long time ago when Drunk Mom came out and was snubbed for every list, award and category despite being a bestseller (which continues to sell a decade later), but this year once I started thinking about it, it became an obsession, and then when the list came out, it became a humiliation. Notice that no one but me was involved in this – the whole thing happened in my head, just as I used to fantasize about kissing various frogs that were not interested in kissing me back. And then I made it worse. I posted about it on Threads, a long, complain-y post that two days in, I’m embarrassed about but that I’m leaving where it is so that it serves me as a reminder to not create traps in my head that I so easily fall into. I keep thinking how in love and in our careers, we often chase illusions—prizes we deem essential, like the unattainable affection of someone like Jason or the recognition of making a 'Best Of' list. Both scenarios teach a harsh lesson in rejection: the true pain lies not in being overlooked but in realizing our self-worth has been contingent on these external validations. I know understanding this would be liberating, allowing me to appreciate my intrinsic value and to step away from the shadow of shame cast by unmet expectations… but I’m not there yet; I keep relapsing. 

1.  I learned that later when I looked him up on Facebook and saw his posts, most recently about various conspiracies, during the pandemic, and incel-like statements about women.