60. I've been expecting it for a while

The crash has come. I've been expecting it for a while.

I didn't start taking my medication, because I started seeing Chris instead and I wanted to have sex with him. The prescription was still pinned to my bulletin board at 9am this morning. I'm still ill.

And I dumped Chris.

I'm not allowed to dump people. I'm also not allowed to turn them down. It says so in the corner of my mind where I store the rules, my rules. The rules say I need to have a boyfriend. The rules say that I am ugly and I don't have an attractive personality, so if someone's deluded enough to fancy me for 10 seconds I need to grab on to that with both hands and stay hanging on to him no matter what. The rules say if I don't do that, I've screwed up one of the few chances I will ever have to con other people into believing I'm a functioning and normal member of society. If I turn someone down or dump them I am refusing to take what is on offer, and that means I deserve to be punished for my own bad attitude. I ought to be grateful for any crumbs of attention.

I also know, on another level, that Chris was using me (being used is better than being single and celibate) that he was no good for me (better than nothing) that things were not going to change (I should have changed my attitude and been what he wanted and maybe he would have loved me)

I called in sick to work today and I am cowering under the duvet on the sofa, intermittently drinking tequila. Tequila - while not a solution - is at least a distraction. I have cashed in the prescription and taken the first of my pills. The symptoms will get worse for about 10 days, and then they'll start getting better. Hopefully.

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE ALONE AND CHILDLESS, YOU STUPID FAT UGLY BITCH. YOU ARE ALREADY LOSING WHAT LOOKS YOU HAVE.

Good morning to you too, Matthew.

HOW DARE YOU DUMP HIM? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? THERE WON'T BE ANYONE WHO WANTS ANYTHING MORE WITH YOU. PEOPLE ARE NOT THAT DUMB. MEN ONLY WANT YOU FOR SEX BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING ELSE TO OFFER, SO YOU'D BETTER TAKE WHAT YOU CAN GET.

I'd rather be alone for the rest of my life than with someone I don't love who doesn't love me.

YOU CONTRIBUTE NOTHING AND NO-ONE GIVES A SHIT IF YOU LIVE OR DIE. YOU HAVE TO KEEP PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE ELSE BECAUSE IF PEOPLE SEE THE REAL YOU THEY'LL KNOW YOU HAVE NO WORTH. YOU ARE NOTHING. YOU ARE A WASTE OF OXYGEN.

I'm not pretending anything to anyone. If I really am a vile worthless piece of crap, people will just have to fucking deal with it. This is the twenty-first century and a woman can be anything she wants.

PIECE OF ROTTEN GARBAGE.

I know you are, but what am I?

At this point Matthew falls silent. He generally does when I manage to laugh at him.

Evil doesn't have a sense of humour. It can't. It can mock others, it can imitate, it can laugh at misfortune, but true laughter and joy is beyond it. To me, evil - real evil - is a grim, humourless, unquestioning certainty of being completely in the right and completely entitled. You see it in terrorists, racists, Christians holding sandwich boards saying gay people are going to hell, the colleague who righteously tells you about the affair so and so is having with the regional manager not because it's a hilarious piece of gossip but because People Ought to Know, and people who throw red paint at women attending abortion clinics. Among others.

Evil is fanaticism - of any description, about anything, and it utterly lacks a sense of humour. Evil does not allow questions, or reasonable doubt, or innocent until proven guilty, or bad cover versions, or jokes at its own expense. Evil laughs at others, but never at itself.

I vaguely recall something to that effect being said during my brief teenage flirtation with Christianity; laugh at the devil and he disappears. If you laugh at someone, you're refusing to engage; refusing to play. You're not just levelling the playing field, you're destroying it.

This works. Sometimes it is the only thing that works, although it often makes people of this type very angry because evil needs, must, has to be taken seriously; for example, rapists don't rape because they want sex. Rape has very little to do with anything a normal person would understand as sex.

Rapists rape because they want power. They want to be scary. They want to be able to feel that they are powerful enough to take whatever they want, whenever they want it. That's the point. That's what turns them on and that's what gets them off. Feeling like they own their victims. Seeing, in a pair of terrified eyes, that they're taken seriously.

I try and laugh at Matthew whenever I can.