I have figured out one of the ways in which I am far too hard on myself.

Yesterday, I went to Safeway to pick up a few things. When I got to the checkout, the following conversation happened.

Cashier : How are you doing today?

Me : I’m doing okay.

Cashier : Your total is X.

Me (referencing the fact that I was paying entirely in coins) : You can tell it’s the end of the month when you are paying with the stuff from your piggy bank.

Cashier : Yup. Here’s your change.

Perfectly normal conversation, right?

But not inside my head. After that brief exchange, I felt like I had failed. I felt embarrassed and like I had done something wrong, and that the cashier now thought I was a total loser.

And even after getting home, realizing this, and essentially internally yelling “That was a perfectly normal conversation with someone you don’t even know! You didn’t fail anything!” at myself, I still feel the same way.

And if that is how a minor conversation with a cashier goes, no wonder I am so fucking shy. With the emotional stakes so high, how could I not be?

And what, exactly, did I fail to do? Make the clearly overworked and tired cashier laugh? Convince him that I was brilliant and hilarious and fun to be around? What exactly was I looking for? What response would have made me happy?

I have been thinking about it a lot since the incident in question, and I have some potential answers.

I think it all boils down to connection. I am emotionally naive enough to look to connect with people whenever I talk to them. And I am so desperate to connect that I look for that connection in all the wrong places.

I don’t have a mode where I just don’t care if I connect. The desperation precludes that. This turns every conversation, no matter how casual, into a kind of life or death situation with the stakes, and the odds, so high that failure is virtually guaranteed. I am desperate to see my light reflected off others because that is the only way I can feel the warmth that I generate for others.

And when it doesn’t happen, I feel a crushing sense of failure, as though I have been rejected yet again.

And all this from what to a more mentally well person would be a perfectly normal conversation of zero emotional impact. The implications of this are positively staggering. My sadness and desperation have led me to be so crazed for connection that a lot of weird and negative shit happens in my head from every single normal interaction.

Obviously, this is part of what makes me try so hard to be funny and interesting and entertaining, but standards that high, while providing the motivation to strive for improvement on a radically deep level, fail more than they succeed because I so rarely get the kind of reinforcement that I need and so I end up not with achievement and success but with misery and despair.

Even when I am at my most socially comfortable, which is when I am hanging out with my friends, the ghost of this misery is there, judging every attempted joke, every conversational assay, every moment of attention by a set of standards nearly impossible to meet and dragging my mood down with it at every turn.

This is obviously not a healthy way to relate to people, but it’s all I know. I guess being the youngest of four and fairly ignored and neglected as a child made me internalize the idea that the only way to get and sustain attention was to be funny and/or interesting, and that if I didn’t maintain someone’s interest in me, it was because I had failed.

It was all my fault. I wasn’t interesting enough or pleasant enough to be worth anyone’s attention. It is a classic case of someone assuming responsibility for something because that makes them feel like they have some control over it.

Which is fine…. if the thing is actually their fault and within their control. But when it is something that they cannot control, it becomes a fast train to insanity.

All my life, I now realize, I was trying to become something that people wanted. I have lived with the burden of trying to become attention-worthy for my entire life. I used what natural tools I had, charm and wit and personality, but my desperation and social awkwardness came through anyhow and alienated me from people.

I am like that sad kid who tries to learn magic tricks so he can meet people. It seems like a solution, but in reality, the problem is one of fundamentally being too emotionally closed off and too socially inept to really relate to and connect with others, and that cannot be overcome by tricks or wit.

It takes real emotional growth on a level with which we neurotic icebound intellectual types are not at all comfortable. It means being able to truly let down your defenses and deal with people in realtime, without the protective barrier of a detached point of view always getting in the way.

It takes calming down inside enough to be human again, and that is not easily achieved. It requires a very deep form of healing before one can trust the world and trust themselves enough to come out of one’s shell and open up again.

It is far easier to keep stumbling along, getting hurt by our own defenses and blaming it on other things, and just making is through the day in a way that works, but makes you feel like you are drowning inside yourself.

I have a lot of memories of isolation and loneliness and sadness to deal with inside me. The disease, while diminished, is still active and still preventing me from curing it.

But every day, I get a little stronger, and the more ghosts I can confront, the sooner I will be free.

But only when I am ready to be free.

There’s nobody to push this little bird out of the nest and make it fly.

Nobody but me, of course.

See you tomorrow, folks!