13

cough.

after a 20 month break, i felt compelled to dust this sucker off. in my last entry, i talked about the beginning of my relationship with katie. soon after writing that, she became everything i thought i wanted. but this past december, i gave up the one sure thing i had in my life and broke up with her. and frankly, my life hasn't exactly been sunshine and lollipops since then. so why did i do it?

katie was an asshole. i've had girls be mean to before, but no girl has ever made me feel more worthless in all my life. over what? my job. yes, i work in a casual dining restaurant and i make peanuts. it's not where i envisioned my life at 26, but it's where i am and i've made the best of it. in fact, during our relationship i was more concerned with moving to chicago to be with her than finding a new career because there would be no point if i was just going to move in six months or a year. and you'd think that out of anyone, my girlfriend that promised to love and support me for the rest of my life, would be the understanding one. nope. she griped, complained, and put me down nonstop. on separate occasions she called me pathetic and a loser. she even accused me of letting my job make me a trashier person because i wore a tshirt with a barely visible hole in it (for the record, it's one of my favorite shirts and it's had a hole in it since i got it, which was before i worked at colton's). it never mattered that i actually liked my job or that i had made dozens of friends there or that i was good at it and respected for that fact and therefore felt the slightest bit of accomplishment. she never once asked me if i was happy there and when i told her anyway she scoffed. after we had finally broken up, she went as far as to tell me my job is what caused our relationship to fall apart. you're right, katie, it had nothing to do with the distance, your parents hating me, you getting drunk and yelling at me, or any of the other countless shitty things you said and did. i spent the last six months of our relationship, probably more, feeling completely abandoned and alone. let me drop a little statistic on you. she also told me after we broke up that thirteen different people told her she was better off without me in her life (am i the only one who thinks it's a little psychotic that she kept a tally?). now even if i had somehow made god awful impressions on everyone i met (i didn't)- her parents, sister, roommate, two best friends, and say (being VERY generous) four other friends, if you do the math, (2+1+1+2+4=10 then 13-10=3) at the very least, three people i've never even met didn't like me based solely on things she would have had to say to them about me. so again, my girlfriend that should be defending me to anyone and everyone is instead not only putting me down to my face, but talking trash about me behind back, creating enemies out of people i don't even know.

so that's why i did it. that's the person i broke up with. that's the piece of shit that instilled so much self doubt in me, i'm still trying to recover. that's the asshole that wasted a year and a half of my life. that's katie.