Confession Time

There are so many things that make me feel guilty I´d keep ten confessionals blocked if I tried to get it all off my chest, but I´ll just get started anyway. At least it satisfies my urge for self-torture, which appears to be at a new high.

Alright, I have this professor who was teaching at my uni for one semester. I took his class, we found there was a subject we were both interested in, I wrote an essay about that subject, he suggested I should revisit it and submit it to a journal. He even offered to read my revisions, and I´ve been failing to send them to him for almost a year now. I´ve last written him six months ago. And the really bad thing about this is that I happen to have a serious crush on him.

I don´t feel guilty for having a crush on him, no. I´m not even worried he might stumble upon this blog, recognize me and find out about it. I´m fairly sure he knows, anyway. There were times when I´ve been wondering if it was mutual.

I just cannot cope with how much I´ve fucked this up. I could still write him, yes, if I managed to finish my revisions, but I´m scared of his reaction. It would be a relief if he´d be openly mad at me, but what if he´s just cool and polite and all the time I feel he doesn´t like me anymore?

I believe the really sad, tragic thing is that he might never have liked me in the first place. I sort of made myself believe that if only I could write a brilliant enough essay we could become friends. He could value me as a person. God, I act as if he was a pop star or something; someone so detached from “ordinary people” that I´d have to be special to mean anything to him. Do something especially awesome. It is sad, but this is just how I feel about him. Like I´m an annoying kid who somehow has to earn being liked.

He moves me in all those stupid ways; he makes me want to be vulnerable to him, even look foolish to him; I´d let him deeper into my mind than most people if only I could be sure he likes me. I wish he would write me, ask me if I´m alright, but even if he should like me he couldn´t do that. Our relationship has always been that tiny little bit closer than the ordinary teacher-student-relationship, and I guess it could get him into trouble if any suspicions arose.

The terrible thing is that this unspoken bond, maybe unspoken mutual liking, has never been explicit, so if I lost it, if my long silence has hurt his feelings or angered him, then we will never be able to talk about it. This is so awful.

I´m still not sure if I didn´t just imagine everything. What if I´m making a complete fool of myself thinking he might like me? Or maybe he does like me, but it doesn´t mean so much to him? I could live with him not reciprocating my feelings as long as he respects me. Sometimes I just wish I could write him and tell him everything, risking to make a complete fool of myself, and he would reply: “My feelings are not as deep as yours, and if they were I´d probably lose my job, but I definitely like you and I enjoyed working with you.” If he would say: “I value your courage for admitting this to me even though you knew I wasn´t going to reciprocate!”, then he would be giving me all I need. I´d feel understood. If I ever told him about my feelings then I wouldn´t do so in the hope for a relationship (I already have a happy relationship, after all), but in the hope for a reply that shows me that he understands and values me.

My feelings for him are, of course, ever so slightly twisted; he is an authority figure, and not just formally. He´s one of those people I feel special respect for. I feel so much respect for him that I´d let him reject me. I wouldn´t be angry, or at least not too much. I would cry, but I wouldn´t feel the need to hide I´m hurt. That´s about the greatest proof of trust I can offer a person. That I would let them make me cry in front of their eyes.

But what if he can´t take this? Even worse, what if he doesn´t understand this? I always felt like he completely understands me even without words, I never believed I could hide my crush from him and gladly so, I wanted him to know! What if I told him all this and he´d be embarrassed and awkwardly try to be nice about saying no to me, as if I had ever expected anything else? It´s only then that I´d feel truly rejected. Or, in the words of Winston Smith:

Maybe one does not want to be loved so much as understood.

Well, maybe yes and maybe no. It is so hard to work on that essay without feeling like he´s looking forward to reading it, like he is looking forward to hearing from me. Sometimes I wish I´d run into him on the street and he´d ask me what the hell is wrong with me. I would so love to tell him everything that´s wrong, both with me and the world. The way it is, though, a simple “are you still working on this”-email would do. But he´s not going to send one. Not after so much time. Just what the hell am I supposed to do? Rework that essay, send it to him with a thousand apologies and hope for the best, sure. But it is so hard to keep working.