Last Night in 2018

Last night, I had dinner with Hitomi. On a flimsy pretext, we went back to her place. While there, I told her that I couldn’t be in a relationship with her. That we could only really be friends. I told her that she was wonderful, and attractive, but that she wanted a family and I was pushing into a career goal that meant that it was impossible for me to give her one in a timely manner.
She told me a lot about herself, and a lot of bad things that had happened, and I understand a lot about her now. I want to help her. Desperately. But I know that I can’t be with her, and that hurts quite a bit. I wish that I’d met her ten years ago. Maybe I could have dated her, or maybe I could have helped her. But I worry that she’s getting too old, and that the damage has set in too deeply.
As she cried, I hugged her, and we snuggled. We snuggled FAR too long, and I shouldn’t have done it, but I ended up leaving, very early this morning, without having so much as kissed her. No matter how much I wanted to. For many various reasons.
I feel helpless. I can’t be what she wants, and I can’t help her. I can’t do anything. She’s a wonderful person, and she’s suffered horrible things, and I’m utterly incapable of doing a damned thing about it. My existence itself made things worse. It’s horrible and painful and I don’t know what to do.

I sat there giving her so many bits of comfort and ideas on how we could work to help her. I was amazed that she didn’t turn it all right back around on me. One of the bits of advice that I gave her was to try to treat herself like she was one of the children that she takes care of. It’s just some modified Jordan Peterson, but . . . there you have it. It’s true. And there’s a point. And it’s something that I should do and that I’m not doing.
The self esteem spiral is going faster and faster, and as my stress and loneliness increase, all I want to do is to eat, to sleep, and to make myself worse. I think that we’ve pretty well blown up the, “It’d be easier if I had a woman in my life,” thesis. Because . . . yeah. That didn’t help. At all.
I just can’t seem to believe in myself enough to do the requisite steps to get myself where I need to be. It’s awful, but there you have it. And it’s frustrating that this portion of the entry is so similar to so many others that I’ve written.
I don’t know what to do.