Tired

I'm freaking tired. 

Exhausted, actually. To the point where I'm craving sleep the way I crave chocolate. Did you know that your body shivers, it trembles, when it is asking for sleep? It gets colder than anything, and your teeth chatter. 

Bristol has always been a revelation place for me. I show up broken and it fixes me. Two years in a row, I spent time there when I was unable to function, and while I was there I broke through into somewhere better. This has not yet been the case this year.

This year, I have things that I know I need to learn that I am refusing to. My lesson is supposed to be to let myself rest. When I've done that, things have gotten better. Some people have not been able to understand this, and a smaller number of people have tried to make me feel like shit when I draw my lines, however shaky they may be. It makes me boring, or selfish, or flat-out a bad friend. Those people have never worked 80 hours, 7 days a week, for 6 weeks in a row. What I need to remember is that it's not about the numbers. It's not about the fact that I have a full-time job and, at the moment, an equally full-time small business. I get stuck on the justifications and miss the point. 

The point is that I'm tired. That's really and truly the point. I wish I were equipped to give everyone what they need, without taking things away from myself, but it doesn't work that way. I want what I want, and what I want is a quiet room with a couch and a stack of movies. I need to find that before the quiet room becomes a padded room. When I was running around trying to tend to everyone else's needs, that padded room wasn't far off. 

I am working on knowing that I am important enough to put my needs first. Some days, I know that more than other days. At this point, it's still intellectual knowledge, not bone-and-breath knowing that I am important. I'll be happier when it gets to that point. 

MonoBoys

I always forget that the boys in Wisco are different from the boys everywhere else. I'm sure that someone will jump down my throat for saying this...like I haven't met enough midwestern boys or something...but they're different. Special different. They're wholesomer. More traditional. They give off a more monogamous vibe. Something about them says traditional, but not in a retro, ironic way like my western boys. In a more serious, no-bullshit way that confuses me. 


Opie's like that. He really actually wants a minivan and a dog, a white picket fence and someone making him dinner. It's why I knew after the first date that we weren't going to end up together. (Why we dated for another 9 months after that is a different story. A much dumber story). 


These boy scouts make me feel evil, and guilty, like I'm going to break them. I feel like a cat playing catch-and-release with a mouse. I can usually tell pretty quickly if I'm talking to a MonoBoy, but I never know when I should let him go. And let him go isn't even the right phrase to use, because they never believe me when I tell them I'm not what they want. It's more that I should push him out of the way and tell him to run for it. I should drive them out to the desert blindfolded so that they can't follow when I leave. 


So if a guy is looking at me like I'm potential GF material...which is laughable on many, many levels...and I'm looking at him like he's a snack, what am I supposed to do? When am I supposed to do it? Dropping hints and being passive-aggressive never works, and usually results in me texting Damaged to ask him to ghost-write my breakup email. (That's a fucked-up sentence right there, but it is what happens). I don't want to give up being faire flirty, but I don't want puppy dogs trying to follow me home anymore, either. It hurts too much, which possibly proves that I have a little bit of a soul left in there after all. I need a way to say this is just pretend, a way to say you're cute, but you still live in the pet store.