…to have a happy childhood.

What a load of crap.

It’s the sort of platitude mouthed by people who don’t think very much when the situation twigs a regurgitation reflex in the word part of their brains.

What made my childhood unhappy was a lack of nurturing and care and general parenting from any of the people tasked with providing that for me.

Try getting that when you’re a dirt poor 50 year old unemployable loser who has never had a job or been in a relationship and therefore is far less than worthless in the eyes of traditional male society.

If I was rich, it would be easy. I’d check myself into some kind of fancy medical care and/or assisted living facility and they would give me all the TLC I could ever want.

They wouldn’t be doing it out of love, granted. But I’d still take it. At least it would be something I could actually get.

Being the broke bitch I am, though, all I can do is rot in pieces until the system is ready to put me back in the hospital where people will be legally obligated to be kind of nice to me for a while.

That is honestly my best, most realistic prospect right now, and yes, that is indeed incredibly tragic and sad in a pathetic kind of way.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet…

But at least I am finally being realistic. The odds of my recovering enough to finally getting around to getting an actual adult life going are diminishingly small.

The smart money is on my continuing on exactly as I am doing now, wasting my few remaining years playing video games and letting the days go by (and the weeks, and the months, and the years…) just like I have been doing for the last 30 years (almost like there’s a trend) until the day I die.

I’m going to be trapped here, buried alive, until I finally run out of oxygen and this whole sick fever-dream of a life I have been living will finally be over.

I don’t want to die.

But the idea of dying is not nearly as scary to me as it should be.

Death should be the scariest thing ever. The idea of dying should scare the organic nitrates out of anybody.

And while I do not, I repeat, want to die…. I can see the upside.

At least this painfully long and brutally unfunny joke of a life will have a punchline.

“… and he died without ever even becoming a real grownup! What a LOSER!”

Well, I told you it wasn’t funny.

Whatever plans I make for the future, they can’t rely on my making any kind of big change to my life because that shit just ain’t gonna happen.

There is never going to be a magic moment when all my mental health issues fall away and I “walk in the sun” at last.

And you know how I know that ain’t gonna happen?

Because I would have to change my behaviour first.

And all I can do is think about stuff.

And write about it.

More after the break.

A different path

So my life story so far is nothing like it is “supposed” to me.

No jobs or relationships. Very little personal growth. No worth at all in traditional male terms. 30 years “wasted” as a fugitive from reality with no parole in sight.

Well, so what? Why does that bother me so much? Who cares?

So I have taken a different path through life. A very unusual and some might say unwholesome one. What’s wrong with that?

Well, for one, it hurts. I can feel the pain of all that I have missed out on very keenly. All that potential left to rot on the vine raises quite a stink and I can finally acknowledge to myself that most of that potential is gone, gone, gone.

I didn’t use it, which caused me to lose it.

I can tell myself and the world that I can still do all kinds of amazing things with this incredible brain of mine and all this raw talent. And like all my self-dooming statements, it is true.

But what is not included in it is all the mental and spiritual machinery that has to be built between me and the world in order for those amazing things to happen.

It’s like I have the mineral rights to millions of dollars worth of crude oil but absolutely no way to extract, refine, and sell it.

And building that machinery will take a lot of work and require me to spend extended periods of time outside my grotty little tomb and away from the big smelly security blanket of video games and that means having to actually figure out what the hell to do with myself and I don’t know that I am ready to do that yet.

Honestly, I don’t think I am. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.

I cannot foresee a future for myself where diving into the deep end will seem any less scary and hard and so on. It’s not like I can learn to handle things like that while still safely on shore.

And I can’t imagine what would even have to happen for that kind of thing to be easier for me. As far as I can tell, I would need to already have the very success I am pursuing, and that ain’t gonna happen.

The only way forward is to kick myself out of the nest and hope like hell to figure out how to fly before I hit the ground.

Maybe I can find an agent. I don’t have a lot of success to show one to prove I am bankable, but maybe I can find one willing to invest time in talent alone.

My instructors at VFS all thought I was an amazing writer.

Maybe an agent would feel the same way.

And that certainly sounds better than having to try to sell my works and my skills myself.

That would be the other route. Doing all the things that writing books tell you to do. Submit my works to every publisher asking for unsolicited works. Sign up for every writing contest under the sun. Network with everyone in the entertainment biz. Start a podcast. Have a YouTube channel. Post to TikTok.

And so on, ad infinitum ad nauseum.

I can’t do all that. I am not a go-getter. I don’t have that kind of energy.

Like always, there are no shortage of things I “could” do., but can’t do.

Lots of solutions built for someone other than me.

Lots of roads leading where I want to go but none that I can reach from where I am right now. No connectors, no offramps, no ferries.

Lots of broken questions with no answers.

So I am stuck, as always, in a situation where I would have to invent a whole new way of doing things just to be able to get anything done.

And I’m so damned tired.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.