I write this lying in bed, typing away on a clicky keyboard. I'm not listening to any music, the door to my room is closed, and even my birds are (temporarily) quiet. All I can hear is the breath from my stuffy nose, and the clicking of the keys as I spill my brain into another text file. I am here, right now, because I feel miserable.
This morning I got up and, during my usually embarrassingly slow wake-up routine, I read a post on reddit dot com forward slash actuallesbiansover25, purporting to give dating advice. One of the advice items was that if you don't want to have sex with the other person, don't bother trying to enter a relationship with them.
Now, as someone who both does not want to have sex with people as a rule, and also as someone whose attraction usually stems from building a close friendship first, reading this hurt. It once again made me feel defective, made me feel like an outsider, made me feel like I did not belong, made me feel like there was no hope for me. Now mind you, this wasn't the first time I've seen comments of this nature, and by that nature I mean comments erasing acespec people, on that forum. It's not surprising, either. Acespec people are still largely unknown, let alone understood and respected, even among queer people.
I tried to not let it get to me, and so I finally got up and went to make some breakfast. My initial plan had been to spend the day on my hair care routine, but I already felt too low on energy to do it today, so I decided to instead spend my afternoon playing some games in the hopes that it would distract me. And that it did, at least for the three hours I played. After I stopped I went to make an early dinner, and my mood came crashing down once again.
I've now spent the past four hours sitting in bed, watching YouTube videos and feeling sorry for myself. My mind kept swinging back to that initial post, and as per usual when I'm going through a mood swing, I started latching onto every single negative thing I perceived about myself: I haven't drawn anything in a long while again. I haven't managed to keep up with work. I didn't even finish the little task I set for myself yesterday. I'm struggling with continuing to write my book. I have been unable to get myself to start messaging new people. I failed at uni again. I can't measure up to what I need to do, nor to what I want to do. I'm an asshole. I'm an idiot. No wonder nobody would want to bother with me if I can't even take care of myself. No wonder nobody would even give me the time of day if all I do is fail over and over, never learn, still stuck on this hopeless path. Why would anyone care when there's millions, billions, of people out there that are nicer, more affectionate, more capable, less complicated, less annoying, less stubborn.
As these feelings crashed in on me, I once again had one lone thought pop into my head:
I wish I was dead.
I had this kind of suicidal ideation a lot more frequently during my previous university time, and pre transition. Since I left university, I'd gradually managed to get off of that thought, and especially so since transition. But I guess it never did leave me. It's still there, it's still this one escapist thought that I keep returning to. Because if I was dead, then all the pain would be gone. I wouldn't have to worry, I wouldn't have to fret, I wouldn't be stressed, I wouldn't be sad, lonely, hopeless, guilty, or anything. I would cease to exist, and it would all be over. What a relief.
Despite this wish of ceasing to exist, which I'm sure is familiar to many of you, I have never been truly suicidal. I am far too much of a coward (another attribute of myself I don't appreciate much) to ever even get close to that. Heck, I can't even use an epillator to get myself smooth skin. So you know, despite my own wishes, I won't die any time soon, unless it's by accident or disease or something. I say this because people always get very antsy whenever I talk about this stuff. Which... I don't know. I have a complicated relationship to suicide. On the one hand, sure, yeah, you can say that if you die you also cut yourself off from any positive experiences, too. But I feel like that's a very shallow view. The suicidal person is suffering tremendously right now and probably has for a long enough time to make such a grand decision. Some vague promise that it might get better at some point isn't exactly instilling much hope. You can also say that it is unfair for everyone that does love them. But that too isn't really helpful, after all suicidal people already think there isn't anyone that cares enough, so trying to guilt trip with a vague threat like that isn't as fear instilling as you might think, and it is definitely putting the weight of others over the individual to a significant degree. It's equivalent to saying that you should suffer to help those around you.
Ultimately all of these things are tackling the wrong issue. The suicidal person isn't the one in the wrong. They are feeling horrible, tremendous suffering because of circumstances that they feel they cannot escape. So you should attack those circumstances, help them get out into a better place, not try to blame and shame them for how they feel right now.
Anyway, all that is to say, please don't give me things like "I'd be sad if you were gone" when I try to talk about these topics, because in those moments where I'd rather be dead, that only annoys me. I do not have the capacity to care, because in that moment I feel bad enough that there is nothing I can care about but that suffering.
As I spiralled off into wishing I was gone, I suddenly felt an urge that I've experienced a dozen times throughout my life. A desire to isolate myself – to cut myself off from everything around me. To be entirely and utterly alone. One part of that desire is the hope that, when I inevitably do return from isolation, I'll see messages of people concerned about me. But more often than not that doesn't happen, making me only feel even more alone and stupid than I already did. Another part of that is that, by being by myself, I also don't receive any other information that could further compound my negativity. Like seeing other people doing better than me, making me feel inadequate and incapable. And I suppose a final part is that, truthfully, I feel the most comfortable being with my own thoughts.
With increasingly personal blog articles like this one and increasingly personal comics as I've done in recent years, I have on more than one occasion come to think, come to fear, that I'm too self-centred. That I spend too much time reflecting on myself. That I've become self-absorbed. I can't tell if that's just me being at my usual nonsense of being incapable of seeing anything about myself in a positive light, or if it's genuinely true. Either way, it has caused me quite a bit of stress, too, to the point where not even these articles feel like a safe escape anymore. I feel apprehension at writing them, because I've written so many of them, filled with so much of my griping, and yet I don't seem to get any better either. What ego, what magnamity do I have to think that people should continue to read this drivel?
And yet, here I am again after all. I've closed all my social media and chat windows. I'm utterly alone in my room, hearing nothing but the clicking of my keys, and despite being so alone, I am still under the spell of anxiety. Anxiety about my place in the world. After 32 years, I still have no clue where I belong. I've found places that tolerate me, at least, but I still usually don't feel like I belong anyway. I can't talk in larger groups, I can't initiate conversations with strangers, I can't work in a usual setting, I can't find love.
Everything I do is useless. Pointless. A scream into the wind. I've published art for more than 15 years, yet still barely anyone cares. I guess my art is too niche, not skilled enough, and I don't have the capacity to do the networking that's required these days. I've written countless pieces of software, yet barely any of it is f any use. It's once again too niche, too specialised, and I don't have the capacity to draw the attention to them to make them be used. I've made many games, but none of them will ever find their audience, let alone make a living for myself. They're too weird, too niche, and I once again and as always cannot get myself to do the marketing, nor have the funds to get others to do it for me.
This last paragraph was especially difficult to write, as tears were clouding my vision. At least there's something I've made progress with. In the last two years I've regained my ability to cry, for whatever that's worth.
I don't know what to do. I feel alone, utterly alone, and not just because I am sitting in my room with nothing else going on. And not just because I closed all my social network things. I just feel utterly alone because I am unsatisfied with where I am, and I do not know where to go. Where do I fit in? Where is my home supposed to be?
Whenever I ask people what I should do to meet new people and find a partner, it boils down to going to group activities of some kind, yet I've never found a place or a larger group that I feel I can truly belong. I don't fit into programming circles, I don't fit into art circles, I don't fit into gamedev circles, I don't fit into queer circles, I don't fit into the local scene. Everywhere I go, I inevitably feel like an outsider. The only time I truly felt at home was when I had my own friend circle as a community forum in my late teens and early 20s.
But that friend circle slowly dissipated as people got more busy, more caught up in their own lives. Now all that's left is a miserable husk of its former self. And I'm still there, still trying to hold on to something that should probably best be left forgotten. That thought, too, brought tears to my eyes.
My friends tell me that I'm kind. A good listener. Nice. Empathetic. Helpful. Smart. Capable. Pretty. A good cook. A great artist. But I... I don't know. I try to be all of these things, but still I get the impression that I fall short. That I'm instead too rough, too forceful, too closed off, too slow, too lazy, too picky, too thick-headed, too annoying, too lacking in skill and patience.
And I guess I feel that way because I lack the sort of trust I need to know that it's fine despite my shortcomings. All I see and experience are confirmations that it is not fine. My finances are dwindling, I can't pay for my own place to live, I can't study, I can't take on a job, I can't seem to enter a relationship. That last point is especially damning, because I still feel like that would be the one thing that could help me push back against all of this.
Knowing that I belong with someone, that I trust them and they trust me, that we can share a life together, I think that kind of trust would help me tremendously in feeling like I belong, not just somewhere specific, but on this world at all.
Now, obviously that seems like quite the weight to place on something that is frequently so shaky and difficult to keep together as a relationship, and having that kind of expectation placed on you would surely be tremendously frightening and off-putting. So please understand that I don't mean it in that way. What I'm trying to express is that, no matter how it happens, I believe that experiencing that kind of trust between two people would help me untangle a lot of my anxieties about my life and my standing as a person. It's not that I want to force that to happen, I just think it is likely to.
Anyway, after vomiting these two thousand or so words onto this text file, I'm feeling quite a bit calmer now, and I think it is about time that I wrap this up, if there is even anything to wrap up about a messy article such as this one.
I have been trying to change myself, trying quite hard at that. Given that, and that I am a rather impatient person in general, I suppose it should be understandable that my not being able to really observe any lasting change to my constitution has been quite distressing. I'm well aware that the lack of observational data could very well be just my own bias, but really, in many ways, despite forging many new connections both in real life and online in the past three or so years, I feel quite a lot more alone than I used to in my early twenties.
Why that is exactly is a question that is too multi-faceted to get into at the end here, but suffice to say that relationships being at the forefront of my mind has a lot to do with it. I hope you'll understand my indulgence in writing yet another article about that topic.
For now I should go put this out, brush my teeth, and then go read a book or something. I hope you're doing OK out there, and that I can speak of pleasant things on this blog at some point. That would be a refreshing change.
