Venting The empty void of success (vent)

[Stripe19]

I am successful. At least, in a reasonable and expect-able way. I'm not a virgin and my body count is somewhat high, i am held in high regard by a good few people, i have my own computer and i am my own boss for money. And yet, despite it all, despite having this? A crowd of friends and lovers, wealth and luxury? It's empty.
So. Damn. Empty. Every lover is a temporary, every friend sees me as someone to go to for help but rarely if ever get chances to feel equal with them. I am famed and wealthy and "sexed" up but none of it matters because its all only true in technicality. It's not enjoyable to enough of an extent, and to some degree i worry nothing CAN be. I feel like im caught in some hedonistic spiral of seeking more and more to try to stave off that feeling of emptiness, but its always only going to be temporary. How much must i have to finally be satisfied? How many people have to sing my praise and feed me gourmet meals before i can actually feel wanted and sated? Worse, how many lives at this rate have i ruined with no true justice sought? People whom i increasingly trusted and believed less and less, people who loved me with all they could only to be met with my cold, fake half smile. To seek a love that i likely have destroyed without realizing a thousand times already. It is a hell of which i rose from the ground. I did not dig myself into a hole, i built the prison that now houses me. Fame and fortune are so well sought by so many but PLEASE heed my warning: Fame does not bring you any recognition or appreciation like you believe. Fortune will only help to get you extravagant and useless items that are little more than a taunt of your naive view being broken too late. Sex is meaningless, food is bland, love is gone, i have had my tastes of the world and now only an increasing MORE will do so much as sate me. Is THIS living? To endless seek stupid qualms to find things that dont exist? To be sitting at expensive hotels and find some reason why the glimmering city below and the finely cooked food are so uninteresting? I despise how the awnser i am met with on my accounts to ask of people why they live are all what i have and they do not, and they just assume that enough money and popularity and sex will make life feel good. It doesnt. Cover me in gold, put me on a throne in a castle on the highest mountain in the world and decorate it with statues, give me thousands of concubines and feasts and such, and it wont change that under it all i am a corpse, slowly rotting away on the inside. Yet, i know it wouldnt matter if i was poor either. I'd still crave this, same as everyone else. I'd envy anyone else to take this spot, and only by being in it do i realize the grass was never green on EITHER side (metaphor). I don't even care about so much of this. In a dream world i just have a handful of nice friends and someone who loves me and i believe them and it's mutual. Literally nothing else even truly matters that much, not that it would stop me from chasing it anyway. The people who vouch to live, even against will, have very clearly never considered someone like me to even exist. They have empty rebuttals, because im supposed to be so happy right? I should be working my way even higher and become a celebrity or politician or something. Frankly, the only thing money an buy is that at somepoint, maybe i can try for someone else to have me catch the bus, the only real way out of this i can see. Afterall, i live now because i have to. Because i am a horrible monster that did awful things to get to this point, but honest and innocent people now rely on me to protect them against people who no longer care about what they've become, and against life itself. My empathy is just barely strong enough i cannot allow myself to have them even slightly think they are responsible for if i were to CTB. They suffer as it is, and even if i hate what i am, they love what i seem to be. I cannot let that wither out. I am everything to those people, i am their supporting pillars. I made it so. And thus, they form the perfect prison, do they not? Bars i cannot bring myself to even part. A cage made of love, and sucess. Perhaps i deserve it. To rot in this hell i have made. To know i must be the moral paragon and big sister and financial help, even if i shouldnt be any of those.
I am devoured by my sucess, and i shall rot on my diamond throne.

 

[figurehead]

I can relate to that. It almost annoys me when people here compare so-called success to a fulfilling life There's absolutely no guarantees. I'm married and have a 14 yo girl. We live in a nice neighbourhood and have two beagles that I love. I had a difficult start (my father used to beat my mum up), but mostly (aside bipolar disorder of course, diagnosed at 18) things went smoothly. In my twenties I didn't find it difficult to have partners - short term only. I suppose I was fun for that and that's all. As they were to me. The first decade, I think, of bipolar was, in fact, very hard, a went jumping from one relapse to another. But that didn't make it difficult to have empty but nice fun. (sorry I'm rambling this is coming out all in wrong order)

Since my teens my greatest dream was to have an academic career. So I did a PhD and a post-doc. That didn't satisfy me though. I ended up giving up. I couldn't stand the ego battle in the staff room. And I never forgave me for that. It felt like the ground was taken off my feet. I felt a complete sham, that could achieve everything by luck never merit.

However glamorous it may seem to go so far academically it was never enough and I was also raving mad during this time. ì met my husband then. Somehow we went through these tormented years. No one could see my bruises and scars. It wasn't talked about so it didn't exist. When we came back to my country, I felt lonely, but soon found myself shielded against a social life, and I still am. I've got ONE friend only. We don't meet often and never speak on the phone (I hate phone calls). She's great and things are great this way.

Pick up the wrong day and I'll I want is to die. Others I'm okay. My relationship with death always been of seduction and impossible attraction. It still is, but it's changed a lot recently. Last year my daughter was diagnosed with cancer (she's fine now) and I became afraid of death, instead of running to it I started running from it.
So you could say that I'm successful. I believe I am, if only I could cover these holes that still torment me.