Lost Cause

Your sorry eyes cut through the bone
They make it hard to leave you alone
Leave you here wearing your wounds
Waving your guns at somebody new

Baby you're lost
Baby you're lost
Baby you're a lost cause

There's too many people you used to know
They see you coming they see you go
They know your secrets and you know theirs
This town is crazy; nobody cares

Baby you're lost
Baby you're lost
Baby you're a lost cause

I'm tired of fighting
I'm tired of fighting
Fighting for a lost cause

There's a place where you are going
You ain't never been before
No one left to watch your back now
No one standing at your door
That's what you thought love was for

Baby you're lost
Baby you're lost
Baby you're a lost cause

I'm tired of fighting
I'm tired of fighting
Fighting for a lost cause

--Beck

Some things that people say to you haunt you for years afterwards, slithering out of subconsciousness and seeping gradually into your conscious thought until they become part of your everyday life; of how you assess yourself. One such thing for me was something a then-boyfriend once said to me:

"Love is wasted on you. My love is wasted on you. I could never, ever love you enough to make up for how much you hate yourself!"

You can't "fix" someone. You can say that till you're blue in the face and still want to fix someone, or want to be fixed. I'm still not really sure if I wanted him to "fix" me; to paste together the pieces of who I had been, who I was, and who I was trying to be and hand them back to me in a perfectly crafted image of how he saw me. And if he had, would it have looked the way I would have wanted it to? Does it ever?

He was right. It's nearly impossible to love someone who swims in that kind of pool of self-loathing. Believe me, I've tried. God, I've tried to love them all. The ones who hate themselves and don't know it, the ones who do and do, and even one who silmutaneously hated himself and me. I don't recommend any of those scenarios, especially the latter. And God knows I've put enough people who've tried desperately to love me, to save me even; through my own personal hell to know that it's not a fun thing to go through.

And in the end, the old adage is true. You're useless to the world until you develop some kind of self-love, or at the very least self-acceptance. You can't claw your way back to the edge of normalcy without it.

So, after awhile, you learn how to save yourself, if you can ever, EVER be convinced that you're worth it. And you learn to surround yourself with people who'll remind you on the days you forget.

But, I think the scariest thing about trying to save someone else is that, every once in awhile, you can't remember if you knew how to swim in the first place.