Things were good for a few months, and now they're as bad as they've ever been. Worse, for having been plinged back down. Almost started writing notes a month ago, and while I'm more stable now, it's still just as bad. Who I am is a rickety scaffold built over a black hole that is the ADHD need for constant stimulation and novelty and I hate myself for it. I tried dating and hooking up, trying to date went miserably and I regret trying, and I feel stupid for ever thinking that I could handle a close relationship with someone, let alone that that someone would want to date me, and also guilty because dating just feels like trying to trick someone into caring about me. Had hookups with 3 people, caught herpes and I just feel so gross and disgusting. There's no way I'm ever going to feel comfortable dating or being intimate with anyone ever again, I'm never going to be comfortable with the "oh btw I have herpes, are you ok with that" talk and even if it happened and they were I'M not going to be ok risking giving it to them. One of the guys I hooked up with I saw a couple times, and he made me feel attractive and cared about and I'm so much worse off now for having felt that way because now I know what that's like and it's not something I'm going to have again. Between physical and mental illness work's been going badly, which isn't a big surprise because I've been nothing but a dead weight to my coworkers for a while now, those who I'm not close with dislike me because of it and those I am close with are frustrated, because they know I want to kill myself and feel like they can't talk to me about what a shit job I'm doing without making me feel worse. I'd gladly gracefully bow out of existence, grab a helium tank and a gas mask and rig up some connections with a one way outflow valve on the mask, snuggle up with my stuffed animals on the couch, and finally not have to deal with any of this shit, except I'm held hostage to existence because people care about me and I'm unwilling to hurt them. I'm well past the point of giving up, it's like I'm already dead, I'm going to be walking around for another several years, probably. I'm so stupid for pretending anything could ever get better. If I'd just stayed hopeless, it wouldn't hurt so much right now. I've spent the last 15 years strangling the life out of the part of me that wanted/needed romantic and intimate connections, then for a few months I revived it and now I have to start all over stomping the life out of it again and it hurts but I know in the long run it'll hurt less. Fuck.