Are men OK?

Don't answer that

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

It’s p.m. Friday. It’s 50-something degrees. I ain’t got no nigga, and no nigga ain’t got me. I’m about to put on my pajamas. A bitch about to freeze. Why the fuck is it so cold out in these L.A. streets?

Turnt up with my Kindle. Turnt up off some weed. Snuggled up under these covers. Fuzzy socks on my feet.

OK. I was going to do the whole rhyme, but then I got lazy.

My brain is fried.

It’s Friday night, and it’s freezing cold in Los Angeles right now, and before any of you east coast or midwest people who are used to extremely cold weather get to typing fast in my comments to tell me that 56 degrees isn’t really that cold, please remember that I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, where we would get a bike for Christmas and actually be able to go outside and ride that bitch before climate change ruined all our lives.

I never owned a “winter” coat in my life until I started going to New York frequently for work 7 years ago, and that coat only comes out when I travel to places with extreme cold.

Bitch, it’s cold.

Anyway, happy Friday my niggas and non-niggas that enjoy my writing.

on healing and therapy

I had a great session with my therapist today. I love untangling my knots and figuring out my own shit.

I’m having an experience right now that is making even more grateful for the work I’ve done in therapy because the Monique of even a year ago may have fallen into the trap of getting in the mud with someone who is wholly unhealed and not even working to get there, but I have been brushing that shit off my shoulder like so much dust.

Word to Jay Z.

I am no longer in the business of explaining myself to people who are determined to misunderstand me anyway.

I am no longer in the business of explaining to grown ass people what they are doing wrong when what they are doing wrong is a repetitive pattern that I have spoken with them about before; they just refuse to change.

speaking of repetitive patterns

A dude I haven’t spoken with in about 18 months hit me up on Monday via text.

Let me give you some background, like those annoying “storytellers” on TikTok.

The nigga got mad at me last year because I told him that as long as he was sleeping with other people, I wasn’t going to be sleeping with him.

He claims he wasn’t mad at that, but the entire discussion centered around what I said.

He first accused me of wanting to be in a relationship with him, which was not true then and is not true now.

He had nothing to offer me in a relationship then, and he still doesn’t now. We are unevenly yoked in more ways than one, and the biggest one for me isn’t even the fact that he doesn’t make that much money.

The biggest thing for me is that he really needs to work on himself and get some healing.

I suggested therapy to him once before, and I will never do that again, because when I told him that therapy might be able to help him, he accused me of “weaponizing” therapy against him.

Baby, look.

As I said, he accused me of trying to get him to be in a relationship with him when what I told him was, “You should go do what you want to do. I will just remove myself from the equation.”

So he wrote large walls of text to me that day in June 2023, airing all his grievances with me, both past and present, some imagined, some blown out of proportion or made to seem bigger than what they really were, and then at the end of it, he told me he was done talking to me.

“Please leave me alone,” he wrote.

BET.

Trust me when I tell you, there is no person better at the leave you alone game than Monique Judge. Baby, I am a gold medalist in leaving niggas alone and right where they are at.

A week after the “Please leave me alone” text, he sent another weak and passive-aggressive text that said, “Hello. I’m not sure where we stand right now, but I hope you are well.”

What do you mean you don’t know where we stand right now? Didn’t you tell me to leave you alone? Like didn’t you have a whole bitch fit in my text messages because I said you can’t get the pussy anymore?

When we get right down to it, I set a boundary for myself, that boundary meant you had less access to me than you would like, and that pissed you off.

But let him tell it, I was trying to “trick” a broke, unhealed nigga into a relationship with me because that’s what I, a woman who has been consistently working on herself since I started regular therapy in 2018, is looking for in a man.

And, as it turns out, I wasn’t well in that moment because that was the day I found out I had a detached retina in my left eye and would require emergency surgery that Monday. I never got to answer the text, and you know what he did?

He blocked me on every social media platform.

I didn’t bother trying to reach out to explain because why should I? If you are going to wrap yourself up in a feelings burrito every time things don’t go your way, there is no way I can help you with that.

You are a grown-ass man with adult children. You need to figure this communication shit out on your own, baby.

Anyway, fast forward to Monday, 18 months after the “I hope you are well” text.

He sent me a text that said, “I wish I could get it right with you. I am sorry.”

I knew immediately that his saying he was sorry was just a way to try and get the door open to talking to me because I have pointed out to him before how whenever he goes off on one of his tantrums and stops talking to me, he always pops back up and starts a new conversation like the previous one didn’t happen.

See, he’s self-absorbed, so he only views things through the lens of his own experience. He doesn’t think about how his words and actions impact other people. He only sees that since he’s now over whatever minor thing it was that set him off in the first place, everyone else should be over it too, even if he was rude, hurtful, and the like while being mad over something silly.

Let me give you an example.

One time he stopped talking to me because he asked me how to use Twitter and other social media platforms, and I told him the best way to learn them is to just kind of dive in and experiment. See what other people are doing, etc.

“It’s the way I learned it,” I said.

He got upset.

“My brain doesn’t work like yours!” he yelled at me before angrily hanging up.

I didn’t hear from him for about a week. When he came back around, he started texting me lyrics to a rap song as a prompt for me to finish the lyric, something we had done a lot in the past.

When I didn’t respond with the lyrics, he then started a plaintive wail in my text messages in the form of “What’s going on? Why aren’t you answering? Are you alive?” messages.

When I pointed out that he had abruptly hung up on me the last time we talked over something really silly and that he owed me an apology, he said, “I was going to get to it. I just wanted to see how you were doing first.”

Nigga, please.

Accountability is like kryptonite to this nigga, so he sees any type of critique as an attack.

He lacks basic adult communication skills, so he sees any type of disagreement as an argument.

He is a whole gaping wound walking around in a grown man’s body, and he doesn’t understand why he has been slowly but surely alienating everyone he has called friend or family simply by being this way (it’s not just with me).

At times, I feel sorry for him, but that sympathy only lasts for so long because he will find a way to ruin it every single time.

I saw his text just before noon. I waited until later that evening, and instead of writing a text back, I called him.

I mean, let’s just get this shit out of the way, right?

When he answered the phone, he said, “Wow” as if he was in shock or something.

“Wow what?” I asked.

“I’m surprised you called,” he said.

“Well, you sent the text right? Did you not expect a response?”

“I wasn’t sure,” he said.

“OK. Well, you said you are sorry. What are you sorry for?”

Here comes the part where I explain to you that this dude is a voice actor who has had national spots with big companies like Walmart etc. He knows how to enunciate his words.

He’s also a poet (another day, I will write about how hooking up with other creative people can sometimes be a fucking drag), so he knows words and he knows how to use them.

When I tell you this nigga got to mumbling and fumbling around for something to say.

“You don’t know what you’re apologizing for?” I asked.

“Well, I didn’t know I was going to be having a conversation about it,” he said lamely. “You had all day to think about this and prepare. All I did was send a text.”

“So, you sent the text not expecting a response? You had no intentions behind the text?”

He didn’t have an answer for that.

I should my head to myself because five minutes into this phone call, I could tell this nigga had literally nothing to offer.

No growth. No evolution. No further healing. He was still stuck in the same spot he was stuck in last time I spoke with him.

“I just miss you,” he said.

Mm hm.

I reminded him of our last conversation. I reminded him that he told me to leave him alone. I reminded him that he sent that text a week later and then blocked me because I didn’t answer. I told him what happened to my eye. I caught him up on what is going on with me now.

He had very little new news to share. Everything is still the same with him.

So we caught up a bit, and then I got off the phone.

I dreamed of him that night. He was in my dream the entire night. I woke up halfway through the night to pee, and when I went back to sleep, he was right back in the dream.

I had some things I wanted to say to him, and I called him to say them, but then I realized it would be a waste of breath, time, and what little precious bandwidth I have any given day, so I changed my mind.

We text back and forth a little on Tuesday about generic things, and I mentioned that I know he was still spying on me even though he had me blocked everywhere else because LinkedIn is a snitch that tells you every time someone looks at your profile.

He tried to deny the spying allegations by saying, well, I didn’t block you on LinkedIn, and we followed each other there, and I had to wonder to myself if he even understood how fucking lame that shit sounded.

You blocked me on every other social media account, but somehow we are still cool on LinkedIn? Boy, be fucking for real.

That’s that accountability as kryptonite thing I was telling y’all about earlier.

Anyway, I changed the subject and started talking about Kendrick and Drake because one of the things that we bonded over in the past is our mutual love for hip-hop.

Fast forward to yesterday, he sends a text telling me something has been on his mind for a while, and he wanted to share it with me.

I bit.

“OK. Share your thought.”

“I really want to taste you. Like really want to.”

“Oh.”

“Oh. Is that your entire response? Word.”

“I don’t know what other response I’m supposed to have?”

“If you have none, I guess that’s the response.”

“I have not been thinking about having sex with you.”

“OK well forget I said it and I won’t bring it up again.”

He then told me he was embarrassed, and honestly, he should have been.

You can’t tell me what it is you are allegedly apologizing to me for, but you want to try and put sex back on the table?

You sent me a text saying you wish you could get it right with me while actively doing everything to not get it right again? Nigga? Really?

I switched the subject back to hip-hop.

Today, he was texting me, and again, i didn’t see them for a few hours because of DND.

He asked,”Are you on DND?”

“My phone is always on DND,” I said. “I have it set for certain people to get through like family and my doctors, but everyone else has to wait. Some people get mad about that, and I can’t do anything about that. Or I won’t. Either way…”

“Yeah, I remember you saying that before,” he said, “but it makes conversation damn near impossible.”

“Is text really for long conversations though?” I asked. “I feel like if someone has that much to say, they can call. Text is for short quick messages, not long deep thoughts.”

“You have your opinion,” he said.

“I do,” I replied.

“So do I,” he said.

“The cool thing is we can both have our own opinions, and we don’t have to agree, and it’s still OK, you know?”

He had already stopped responding, and I haven’t heard from him since.

In our initial conversation on Monday, I told him that there were some toxic cycles in this “friendship.”

I put the word “friendship” in quotation marks because I realize while I want to be a friend to him, friend is the word he uses to keep his toe in my pool.

Friend is the word he uses to obfuscate his bullshit. He wants all the best parts of me – truly wants the girlfriend experience from me, but he wants to use “friendship” as a shield to avoid accountability.

I’ve told him before that a friendship is just as much of a relationship as a romantic one, and it requires just as much work and commitment from both parties to make it work, but he never hears that.

I may as well be the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

When people are self-absorbed, they are completely wrapped up in their own wants and desires. They have little to no regard for how their actions and behaviors effect other people. They are more concerned with their on self-interest, and they do very little to meet the needs of other people.

Self-absorbed people don’t show or express remorse when they hurt other people. They ask things of other people while not reciprocating (he literally asked me on Wednesday to use my large platform to help him get more voice work).

The biggest thing (in my opinion) about self-absorbed people is they feel entitled to get what they want.

I have experienced all of these things with him.

When I spoke with my therapist about him today, she said she was proud of me because she could see the change in me – including my setting firm boundaries with him and holding on to them no matter what.

I know the whole DND conversation was a ploy to get me to let him past it, and when I didn’t relent, he stopped talking to me.

I’m taking bets on how long y’all think it will be before he’s right back in my inbox doing his same song and dance again.

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There are probably mad typos in this because my eyes are crossed at this point, and I’m too tired to edit it any further.

Anyway, hop in the comments and let’s discuss. Do you now or have you previously had someone in your life like this?