Alert readers will recall that I have said that I never had an imaginary friend as a child. I never went through that phase. I was always a strangely literal and self-possessed child who never thought of his stuffed animals as real animals because… they weren’t.

We had a lot of cats. Those were real animals. And they purred and rubbed up against my leg and played with me. What stuffed animal could compare?

Which leads me to what I am pleased to call my point : I did have imaginary friends of a subtler sort than the usual kind depicted in media.

And the cats were part of that. They were my friends because they were companions whom I loved and cherished and who kept me from feeling too lonely. Even when nobody else was paying attention to me, I could always go find a cat and pet it and it would purr and it would love me.

No wonder I am such a cat person.

Mental note : any place I move to has to allow pets, because I am getting me a cat, god dammit. I want my own cat to cherish and look after and pet and cuddle and LOVE.

And I am quite sure I can be a good cat owner. Cats’ needs are simple, after all. They take care of themselves, more or less. Keep the litter box empty and the food and water dishes full and you are good to go,.

Plus, I speak cat, so to speak. I get cats. Growing up surrounded by them and spending so much time with them gave me a lot of time to wonder what was going on in their fuzzy little heads and observe them and their ways.

Plus I know the family secret of how to raise loving, affectionate, wonderful cats : never hold them against their will. Never grab them, especially not suddenly. When they want down, let them down. Let them do their own thing.

Follow those rules religiously and I guarantee you will raise a happy, secure, cuddly cat who is very people friendly.

Where was I? Oh right, imaginary friends.

Now obviously, the cats were not imaginary. They were real cats. I’m crazy but I am not psychotic. I have witnesses.

So they were only imaginary friends in the sense that they were a non-human substitute for having real friends.

Another type of imaginary friend I had was the characters on the shows I liked. As you know, I was largely raised by television (and cats), and the shows I gravitated towards were the ones that gave me a warm feeling of inclusion.

Hence my love of sitcoms. Any decent sitcom has warm, lovable characters who spend a lot of time together and form a family of sorts – either literally or by association.

So whether it was the Huxtables, the cops on Barney Miller, the gang at Cheers, the courtroom of Judge Harold T. Stone from Night Court, or the Keatons from Family Ties, these fictional people and their fictional “families” became extensions of my own family and when I spent time with them, I didn’t feel so alone.

No wonder I want to write for TV. It’s the closest I can get to moving into the TV screen and living with the “family” that doesn’t make me feel like I don’t belong.

Where everybody is witty and funny and everything always works out okay and everyone gets along with one another, even when they fight, and there is a real warmth to their relationship, the kind of emotional warmth I so desperately crave.

It’s so cold in here, I need all the warmth I can get. IT might seem strange to people who know me but don’t know me that well that I might talk about arctic freezeburn of the soul when to them, I seem like such a warm and cuddly guy.

But I can’t feel my own warmth unless it is reflected back to me in someone else. And it’s that craving for reflected warmth that makes me such a warm guy, I think. I have every incentive to output as much warmth as I can in order to maximize the amount that I get back.

So it’s true that making other people happy makes me happy. It really does.

But that has a lot to do with my inability to feel my own happiness, leading me to having to bypass my broken circuits and get my happiness the long way around.

The last and saddest form of imaginary friends from my childhood were the imaginary friendships I had with the small number of fellow students who were sort of nice to me.

Or at least, less actively hostile towards me. They intermittently tolerated me. They were not quite enemies. Whatever.

Now I didn’t go all stalker-crazy on these people and imagine this whole elaborate relationship between us that existed in secret or any of that craziness.

But I did think of them as friends when odds are, they didn’t think of me at all. Or if they did, they were not kind or tolerant thoughts.

I mean, I was such a weird kid. Nothing about me made sense. I was both effortlessly brilliant and hopelessly clueless. I radiated intelligence (still do, apparently) while also being a total slob and kind of gross. I talked like an adult but I acted like a timid toddler. I was both ferociously independent of mine and pathetically dependent of emotions. I got amazing marks without doing anything to “earn” them and worse, seemed to take that for granted instead of seeing it as the valuable thing it should be.

Most people have never met anyone remotely like that and I have never a kid quite like I was depicted in the media. People have no slot to fit me into.

And even though I am a shapeshifter. I can’t/won’t change to fit their slots, either.

Leaving me as a rugged individualist who lives by his own rules.

But not like… on purpose. I have no choice.

Becaause I just got to be me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

I think it’s time I moved on.

The subject cqame up in therapy today. My therapist asked me what I thought would help me to feel better, and I thought about it, then said “a change of environment.”.

It just came to me. And the moment I said it, I knew it was true and that I could no longer dodge the subject, like I had done before.

I need a change of environment. I need pastures anew. I need to go someplace where I can start over with a clean slate and remake myself. Someplace where I am free of past contexts and can find out who I really am.

And that means moving out of my current situation. And that means leaving Joe and Julian. And that’s a pretty big deal.

They have done so much for me and I would hate to seem ungrateful. But I have ot do what it best for myself, and right now, that means moving on.

Now obviously, it’s not going to happen tomorrow. It will take a long time to figure out where I want to live and find a place and move and all that jazz.

But I gotta do it. That’s super clear to me now. It’s time to move on and figure out how to be myself, by myself, with nobody to do things for me and therefore nobody to be dependent on and therefore nobody to feel like a burden on.

It will do me worlds of good to finally live on my own. Somewhere closer to the action. Some nice quiet neighborhood with lots of trees and families and suburban appeal.

Someplace like the neighborhood I grew up in, in other words.

And I want to live in a house again. Admittedly, that conflicts with the idea of living alone because it’s not like there are a lot of houses for rent that I can afford.

Certainly not with the real estate market going manic psychotic right now.

But even without that. I could do maybe a maximum of around $700/month in rent, and that would be really stretching things.

And I am pretty sure they don’t make houses that small. As nice as that would be.

Oh, and Felicity, Julian, don’t worry, I won’t leave your life entirely. I will still be available for our usual kind of hanging out.

It’s a change of living arrangement and that’s it.

But I have to go. I need to find someplace I can truly call my own. Someplace where everything is something I bought and I can arrange it however I like and and thus figure out what kind of environment best suits me.

And I need to be around people who are healthier than I am. I love my friends but we are all kind of broken and I think I need to be around people I can learn from. People who are healthy and strong and engaged with life.

Not totally sure how I would arrange that, but I will figure something out.

And here it is, eight hours later, and I dunno about the whole moving thing. The enthusiasm has faded and with it, the certainty.

But I am tired right now, and therefore not keen on anything that sounds like work. I will see how I feel about the whole idea once I am well rested and alert.

I’ve been pretty sleepy today. Must be time to settled up on all that sleep debt. I feel like I need a long nap just to build up the energy to be sleepy.  I just want to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.

But I know that this, too, is transitory. At some point I will catch up on sleep and come out of that particular fog and get to something like a decent waking state.

Inasmuch as I ever do, I suppose.

I have spoken here before about how when I fall back into the bad habit of not bothering to get dressed if I am not going anywhere, the line between being asleep and being awake can get mighty fine.

In general, that’s the case with my life even with the clothes on. When I am alone in my room, which is most of the time, my state of consciousness is rather blurry around the edges and soft in the middle.

How could it not be? I spend so little time in reality, mentally speaking. I am always wrapped up in the world inside my computer.  Even as I type this, I am filtering out 99 percent of sensory input, making this computer the core of my subjective reality.

And I like that. I like escaping into the computer. When I am absorbed by what I am doing on the computer, my mind is too busy to let things like depression and anxiety in, and I feel safely removed from the reality that I fear.

And yup, that’s bad for me. That is an undisputed fact. If I could stand to spend more time dealing with reality, I could improve my real life to the point where I would not have such a strong need to escape.

Assuming that is possible. The virtual world will always be easier to deal with than the real world because it is less physically stimulating and way easier to control.

So it might be that even if I had the life of my dreams, I would still be tempted to retreat into my computer in one way or another.

It’s kind of like an addiction in that you might recover from it but it never entirely goes away. I will always know there is a solution to life’s complications. One that is terrible for me in the long run, but so very very easy in the short run.

If I am to escape my cage, then, I will need to stand up to that evil voice of sloth, ennui, and apathy in my head and tell it that I Want to get shit done. Period.

But I still have all this sadness inside.

And it keeps getting in the way,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.