Sleep

I could not for the life of me get to sleep last night, and so I instead experienced what I came to call the Self-Loathing Spiral. It was not fun at all, and went something like this: "God I need to be less grumpy with people, it isn't their fault I'm bored" -> "I'm really just not used to being around people after an entire semester of not having any friends" -> "But did I really have friends at Geneseo? One of the reasons I left was because I felt alone." -> "Pretty much no one likes me. It's entirely probable that more people dislike me than like me." -> "Because I am a bad person." -> "Part of the reason I want to go into the Peace Corp. is because I am a worse person than other people, and so I have to make up for it." -> "I don't even know how to make friends, and even when I somehow get them I inevitably push them away or fail to hold their interest. I should just be quarantined." -> "And forget about dating. As soon as someone expresses interest in me I get bored, and that's no way to treat someone. I should never act on my attractions. Ever. It never turns out well." -> "I'm not even a good student, the Peace Corp. is just a defense mechanism to spare myself from applying to grad school."
And of course I revisited the infamous Spring Break Facebook thread. And then I thought about my speeches from when I ran for the rugby Board (and lost three times) and felt like a moron. I don't have any reason to think people on the team even like me, running for Board was just stupid. It was pretty miserable. I usually like myself, but lately I've been wondering why that is. No one else seems to like me, and my theory that if people really understood me they would like me doesn't hold water when good friends dismiss you as a bad person. That's one of the things I like about Smith though, is that no one really knows me there. Even after a semester, I still have a pretty blank slate. I don't have to be my old self, I can see where I went wrong and try to be better.