They Say

They say you should never go to bed angry at a person close to you.

They don't tell you how to do that if said person is you.

I Needed That

Finally something positive.

Movie night was amazing. Thank you.

Shoot For The Stars ...

... because it doesn't matter if you don't have eyes to see where you're going, or a mode of transport to get up there, let alone the fuel to propel you.

So many people see their idols and, in awe, vow to be like them.
Isn't it even the slightest bit telling that I saw my idols and immediately hated myself, vowing that I could never do what they do?

Does it help that my reasoning is, in fact, legitimate? How far does optimism take you when the real physical world has effectively unsurpassable limitations? And what do you say to those fucking happy faces that are content enough in their ignorance to live by their shitty aphorisms - and worse, share them with you, thinking they will be the ones to show you happiness?

Time heals all wounds.
Yeah, even though time itself is the entity wounding me.

The grass is always greener on the other side.
No fucking shit, those people have actual soil, and the resources to pay for a water supply and people to take care of it.

You don't need others in order to be happy.
No, you ass-clown, YOU don't need others to be happy. Twenty-seven goddamn years in my own head and body gives me far more clarity on what I need than you could ever hope.

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Fuck pets.

Everything I see is just a painful reminder of what I need, what I'm missing, what I'll never get. Who's going to scratch me behind the ears and tell me what a good girl I am? Is that really so much to ask?

Ignorance is bliss.

Please

Please?

Who cares for courtesy in these parts ... ?

Take These Broken Wings

Can something be considered broken that was never actually completed?
I mean, I know you can break incomplete things, but can you call something incomplete 'broken'?

Am I a broken person, or just incomplete? What pieces complete me; who, what, where is the one that made me (or rather, failed to do so)?

Meaningful dreams elude me in the void.
Alone I drift under the stars
Pondering the fate of children
Dying from afar, so far ...

Where do we go, we who laugh in the face of chaos?
Crowded places full of loneliness, loud as the clapping of one hand
Squaring our shoulders, circling the drain of consciousness
Triangulating the point of no return

A line of fools crosses the threshold.
Holding our tears in our veins
In vain do we hold our souls
Wandering aimlessly across this plane of existence.

Don't You Dare Fucking Tell Me It's Sexist To Be Straight.

If I start with the words "skin hunger", I feel the need to clarify that no, I am not a cannibal.

Touch deprivation is very much a real thing, and (evidently) not talked about nearly enough.

I'm not qualified to talk about it, except to say that it's highly probable that I suffer from it.
But if I'm not qualified, who is? And why aren't more people, more qualified people, talking about it more openly?
(I mean, I know the answer to that question, but jeez it's depressing.)

It's more a psychological problem than anything else, but we all know what the state of psychological help is for me. (Hint: it's not in good shape where I am.)

Have I peaked? How do others see me? Do I exude the hunger through my pores? Can women smell it off of me?
Who's going to help? I mean, I'm all for those 'talk-to-another-person-about-your problems' apps and initiatives, but why can't people accept that the effect of those is marginal at best when the root of the problem remains unaddressed? This problem is never going to be solved by words that do not lead to a touch.

Platonic, friendly, affectionate, anything ... and while we're on the subject, fuck you for just dismissing it with "get yourself a pet".
Yes, you. Fuck you. Fuck you very much.
I mean you in particular.
Do you not think I would have tried that, if I felt even the slightest chance it might be good for me?
You think I want to live with this pain, this fear, this utter existential dread and loneliness forever? Do you think, do you honestly think, some dumb animal is going to help with that when I can barely even connect with humans whose communication I can mostly understand?

Jesus. Talking about this isn't helping. You could always tell me to 'touch myself' but hey, are you naive enough to believe that hasn't already happened? If it helped I wouldn't be here talking about it. Some days I hug myself and fall asleep wishing I knew how to cry.

Come cry with me. Please.

And don't you dare fucking tell me it's sexist to be straight. I didn't ask for this. You didn't ask for this. Fuck you even more than the rest of those proselytizing pet-promoting fuckers.

What Are You Worth, Really?

The few times people observed me talking about myself to interested parties, the prevailing commentary tended to be "You're not doing a great job of selling yourself".

Fuck you.

Where were you when I was young and impressionable? At a time when I could have actually learned how to be the best self that I could be?
Skills are learned.
Talent is less than worthless without motivation and reward.

I'm not here to sell myself. I'm here to get help. I need help. I need a hug.

Stop

I can't even read the word 'trust' right now without feeling pangs of regret for things I wasn't even responsible for.

I've never fully trusted myself, although I was always hopelessly naïve and trusting. Weird, isn't it? It's a shame. A damn shame.

A person who is good at what they do trusts themselves to do it. There is a prerequisite of experience and self-esteem that is undeniable and compelling. I've never had that. There's so many music pieces that I love and yet, even with years of practice, when I get up on stage I have yet to perform them without a single mistake.

Perhaps this is why I can never feel complete without a group. But what does it bode for me when I can't feel trust in my group?

Trust at the root of everything... a feeling I can't properly grasp.

Someone help me to learn to trust again.

Selflessishness

Everything I do, I do it for you ... for you to do for me as I do for you ... I think?
Maybe it's all for China. (Thank you Tim Minchin ...)

So far, it seems that the oft-pondered mystery of human contact - or lack thereof, technically - is figuratively (and perhaps even literally) debilitating.

It's a matter of trust, you see. I don't trust myself, so how can anybody else trust me, let alone love me?
Touch is all I know, all I feel, all I fear. Probably won't be long now before I get lovingly caressed by the considerable momentum of an errant vehicle. To die without a hug; is it worth it?

Am I worth it? Somebody save me from this fucking hellhole, because my conscience is irrevocably past the point of apathy.

Also, random girl crying on the side of the road. I wish I'd had the strength of character to talk to you. For what it's worth, I love you - or at least, I hope somebody does.

The Bad Thoughts

No more BFF person.

Can't talk to anyone.

Can't be honest, can't trust.

Can't stop comparing.

Can't stop seeing, can't stop hearing.

Can't stop feeling, can't stop thinking.

Nobody asked for this stunted world - I sure as hell didn't ...

A breath of fresh air? The brush of skin? The void in my soul, my eyes out of control.

Don't leave me alone with my thoughts.

Reflecting My Eyes, But Not Me

Can I trust you? Can you feel what I feel, see what I see, dream what I dream?

Can I trust you? In all that I see are the cracks of reality leaking through.

Can I trust you? Hope is a lie, bred of love and insanity. Hope ... for more.

Can I trust you? You who proudly proclaimed the mysteries of my soul even before you saw me?

Mirror, mirror, on the wall - reflecting my soul, the corner of a ball.

Can I trust you?
Can I trust you?
Can I trust you?
Can I trust you?

Or can I not?

Leading The Charge

Well, here I am. Starting to write this post several hours after informing no less than three friends that I was already working on it.
Guess there's something to be said for external accountability.

In a weird way, not counting my brother's implicit tyranny or my generally sheltered upbringing, discovering feminism is what fucked me up the most.
I mostly thought girls were just not-boys. It doesn't help that the (Catholic) school I went to for nine years kept us segregated. I didn't talk to the girls much because virtually none of them took the public bus home. It irks me to think just how different my life might have been if we'd just got me on the school bus instead.

Women were different, and while I knew that in theory I had no understanding of it. I never received any form of the sex talk from my parents ... or rather, it wasn't a talk so much as a book that my father gave me and told me not to read until my 13th birthday. Of course I read it pretty much immediately. And wouldn't you know it, I had already seen what genitals looked like in the encyclopedia. 'Adolescence' was in there too, and it held little interest for me even as I began to experience it.

I didn't understand that periods were a real thing, even as I read about it in the encyclopedia. I found the part about airplanes far more interesting. I didn't know how women experience the world differently, because the only one who might have been close to me and shown me - my sister - departed for college in America when I was 11. As time went on, I became afraid to talk to girls, and I never truly understood why. It's a telling thought that I lived next to a beautiful girl - who was in my year - for many years, and barely knew of her existence until we had nearly graduated.

All of this is ancillary. I can't pinpoint a specific event that led to me being so introverted. Nor can I quite explain how I reinvented myself once I went to college. It was there in the USA that I realized the importance of a hug, and this has shaped me ever since. Not counting my early youth, in the years that I needed it most I wasn't really familiar with human touch that was more than momentary or rough. Gently holding a girl's hand, for example, at Mass during the 'offering of peace', was something I'd hardly experienced before. This is among the few things that kept me attending church in the USA, God be damned. The chance to hold a person's hand, and share an experience with them. What actually fucked me up was finding out all the shit that goes on around that simple desire.

The literal and metaphorical meaning of 'harmony' is something that is lost on the average self-righteous Catholic here. I need harmony in my life. I need a catalyst to lower the bar that must cross to get the ball rolling.

I need to sleep.

Try ... again?

What am I up to now - three?

I don't want to play games. I don't want to be dishonest. I want to be loved and I need a hug.

It Is Unfortunate

It's unfortunate that the world is a false dichotomy.

It's unfortunate that if I appreciate some parts of my life I am not allowed to dislike other parts of it. All or nothing? Fuck you.

It's unfortunate that I have no desire to die, but I also have so much issue with the idea of continuing to live.

It's unfortunate that I didn't develop the social skills necessary to communicate myself to those I want to care about. Fuck your bridge game, dad, because you can't accept that maybe I would have been more appreciative of all you've given me if you actually worked less, played less of your stupid fucking billiards and bridge, and taught me to appreciate what I had instead of shouting. It's way too fucking late now.

It's unfortunate that all I see on social media is (with a few exceptions) the happiness in people's lives, and not the darker side of the coin.

It's unfortunate that if my brother had treated me, so many years ago, with the compassion that he recently showed that dog that bit him, things would have turned out a lot different - Or would they have? Considering that, being only 4.5 years older than me, he hadn't learned such compassion at the time ...

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The house I'm living in overlooks a pretty nice view. That picture being taken from the roof, of course.
The view's somewhat less majestic down at the road level, but it's still nothing to sneeze at.
By which I mean that the view at the road level is usually another person.

That's right, I live next to one of the chill-out/make-out spots in town. "Good for you!" might be your instinctive reply, for which I don't necessarily blame you.

Yesterday there were a bunch of kids hanging out there. Unlike me, most or all of them are perfectly comfortable with the shitstorm that is Indian traffic. They also seemed perfectly comfortable with each other, something that I don't ever recall being. Maybe it was because I didn't hang out with my classmates much. I couldn't even begin to tell which was the cause and which was the effect.

Making friends as an adult is harder than it has any right to be. In a half-alien culture, no less.

Don't read this

Everyone's Different

People will tell me, "Hey, you have't gone through shit in your life. Deal with it."

Does it occur to them that maybe - just maybe - the reason I don't know how to just 'deal with it' is because I never went through any shit in my life that would teach me to deal with it as effortlessly as they do?

Nobody should depend on anybody else, right? Isn't that how society works?
I thought society functioned and became 'civilized' because we could depend on others for the things we are incapable of ourselves.

Some All chemical reactions require a certain input of energy to take place. Most laymen never really consider this, because nature generally takes care of the pertinent variables. Non-chemists also never truly appreciate the ubiquity and importance of catalysts in said reactions. Life would not be possible, or at least not in any meaningful way, if there were nothing helping the reactions along that keep us autonomous meatbags mobile and conscious.

Since you probably drifted off to sleep during that small digression on chemistry, very few of you will truly appreciate the parallel drawn from the microscopic chemical world to the rather macroscopic world of daily life and psychology. All other things remaining equal, what would be the odds of a given reaction occurring if a catalyst was not present?

Where and what would you be right now, if nothing helped the process along?

Where and what am I? Where is my catalyst?