Possible Reasons Why These Stock Photography Models Are Feeling Emotional
Just found out his ex girlfriend has already slept with two other people since they’ve been broken up and is attempting to integrate this information stoically, as he has already slept with one person and had romantic feelings for at least two other people since the break-up. Ultimately feels very distressed about the whole situation. Additionally, is experiencing pre-language fears that “time will catch up to” him in that soon he will find out his ex is suddenly pregnant and getting married and that’s it for them, like someone has died; it will never be taken back and he will be out of her life forever.
Has recently come to the conclusion that one of the most aversive traits a person could have is neediness. This realization occurred while driving, his wife in the passenger seat and his daughter in the backseat, silent. He was thinking about the fact that the dogs required walking when he and his family got home, which was five minutes away. He was overcome with a seven-second-long hatred for the dogs, for their incessant neediness, and this feeling then transferred to his beautiful wife and child, who were sitting there innocently, his wife with her hand on his thigh and his child thin and limber in the back seat. Immediately aware of the inappropriateness of his feelings, he began to detest himself — the same old self hatred. Why was he like this? Why couldn’t he just accept people? Why did it have to be so f-cking hard all the time?
From her SUV, with her husband sitting beside her, viewed, on the corner, a man in an orange REI jacket wearing a large hiking backpack standing stationary on the sidewalk. As they passed him, both the woman and her husband saw that he was very agitated and talking very quickly, to no one. “He’s malfunctioning,” she said to her husband.
Last weekend, took a large dose of molly with his publisher and a few friends at his publisher’s apartment in midtown Manhattan. Immediately after taking the dose — which all in the party had done at the same time — a curious quiet descended on the group suddenly, and he took it to mean that no one in the group had actually realized that they were going to take molly; up until that point, it had sort of been a hypothetical prospect that they laughed with each other about. How fun that would be, to take molly together! Now that they had taken it, however, the stock photography model suspected that reality had set in for everyone — they all just took a pretty big dose of a pretty strong drug — and perhaps everyone was temporarily nervous about it. Nervous about having an adverse reaction, nervous about perhaps spending the whole night retching violently. Later, when things were full-on, when everyone was really high, and thankfully, in good spirits, they had all gone to a nearby hardware store as some kind of mashed-up gag. He had excitedly put his headphones on, Radiohead, and was listening to them at full-volume as they invaded the empty hardware store’s second level. Here he observed a knock-off George Foreman grill thing, and before he could think, yelled very loudly “They’re f-cking ripping George Foreman off!!” Everyone quickly hushed him and looked concerned. He laughed.
Last night, he lay his head on his on-again-off-again girlfriend’s chest, and she cradled it instinctually, and he said “You see? You’re the only girl who knows how to do this. All the other girls play the part but they don’t understand the role. None of them get it. No one is like you. I’m never going to find anyone like you.” She smiled. She said “Well, we’re together now.” “Yeah but, it doesn’t work between us,” he said. “This isn’t going to last that long.”
Secretly believes he’s tricked people into thinking he’s been worthy of whatever praise, admiration, and career position he’s ever earned, and that one day he’ll be found out. He’ll be discovered as a fraud. A large, village-style shaming will ensue, and he’ll lose his job, his lover, and all his friends because they will have realized the whole time that he was a phony, never good enough for any of them, and they will feel betrayed and indignant, and he will be ashamed.
Realized, on recent surprise visit to an ex who she had moved away from to start a new career in NYC, that she had only taken the trip to feel better about herself via being a savior-like figure for the ex, who had just had his heart broken by a new female in the three short months that they had been broken up. This realization was coupled with another, more devastating irony that, in order to be her ex’s savior and harvest the resulting validation, she would need to help him sort through his very real heartbreak, which would be a very painful and difficult thing for the stock photography model here pictured to do. Both these realizations struck her down, in her ex’s living room, on the couch, her ex crying because they didn’t feel “connected” and that what was once a shared life between them now contained a sort of wall, which was the ex’s most recent heartbreak. She spoke this aloud, her dilemma, suddenly realizing how pathetic she was — her surprise visit executed under the guise of caring, with the real, secret agenda of using it to feel good about herself, to act as a temporary crutch for her own feelings of inferiority — and then had vehemently articulated a rejection of trying to help him at all. Pathetically, she realized, she had gotten upset at him for imposing this on her, shaming him for it, even, when in actuality she was reacting to her inability to even follow through with a task as base and disrespectful as harvesting validation via being a shoulder to cry on. At this point, the trip is threatening to be a shameful “no one wins” situation in which she doesn’t receive the ego boost she came for and he isn’t comforted about his emotional situation.
Just got out of her second (of ten) laser tattoo removal session. She’s hated the tattoo since perhaps a month after she got it — something like 5 years ago — having quickly realized how pathetic and emo and inauthentic it really meant to have branded herself that way. Having had to bear other people’s interpretations of it over five years, two several-month long tropical backpacking trips, and several lovers, which she always perceived as “embarrassed for her,” she has finally decided to get it removed after her mother pressured her into going on a family vacation in the Bahamas in which she will surely have to appear, in front of her family — who are conservative people from the south who do not understand sarcasm and irony — in her bathing suit. The tattoo is from Anagrams, a Lorrie Moore novel. It says, in lower case Helvetica, on her breastbone, “life is sad/ here is someone.”
Has recently come to the conclusion that despite having spent the past four years as a mid-level computer programmer, she is in fact not talented at all and has never been a “real” programmer and so should give up programming entirely — she had only wanted the social benefits, the romance, of being a programmer, and had convinced herself that she was skilled when she was not, at all.
While watching yet another National Geographic documentary on Netflix Instant with her boyfriend, realized that they’ve become reliant on these documentaries to avoid talking and interacting with each other. This realization opened up a Pandora’s Box of subsequent doubts and associations which, with him next to her right now, has made her suddenly completely averse to physical contact with him, which frightens her terribly, as she has never felt this way about him — or any of her lovers — ever before.