Like a lot of people, especially intellectuals, I don’t interact with reality on a real-time basis. Direct exposure to reality is anathema to me, and so I require an extensive and complex cognitive structure in which to hide.

Call this my fortress. Its thick walls and complex structure give me a feeling of safety and calmness. For better and for definitely worse, I can’t be reached there. Nothing can get to me there.

Nothing can hurt me there.

And I have lived in this fortress since I was a small child. I think it began when my father sexually abused me. Like a lot of victims of abuse, I took my mind away. I told myself I wasn’t there, this wasn’t happening, I was somewhere far away.

That vital disconnection from the reality of what was happening to me become the foundation of my fortress. I wasn’t here in unfiltered reality, I was deep in my fortress where I was safe. I displaced myself from reality in order to hide from its truths, and built this fortress, this thick and sturdy armor, so that I could not be hurt again.

This, of course, does not work. Sure, it removes you from the immediacy of your surroundings, but it does so at the cost of making you very awkward in your thick and heavy armor.

And it cuts you off from the world. That is its function. In keeping you from getting hurt, it also keeps you from getting help. It cuts you off from nearly all sources of emotional sustenance and leaves your soul to starve.

It is too extreme a solution – a cure that is worse than the disease.

What got me onto this line of thinking is that I recently realized just how many people tried to be my friends when I was suffering from extreme isolation and bullying as an elementary school student.

It wasn’t exactly a daily occurrence, but there was at least half a dozen kids who made a real effort to get to know me, but it just didn’t take. They couldn’t reach me. I was too far gone.

So I would be friendly and polite, but in a distant way, and they would sense that I was not easily accessible, take that as rejection (which it was, in a way) and stop trying. I was just too weird a kid.

The fact that I couldn’t relate to them didn’t help. In a particular way, I grew up far too young and too fast, and I honestly could not relate to people my age. The things they liked to do seemed pointless to me. I only liked to read, watch TV, and play video games. The traditional sort of toys bored me. Not stimulating enough.

But even if that hadn’t been the case, the fortress would have interfered. Indeed, it might be the main reason I couldn’t relate. I had built my fortress out of books and TV and video games, and bound them all together with the icy cold perfection of my overweaning intellect.

Somehow, before even hitting Grade 1, I had become an intellectual. And who the hell is an intellectual in grade school?

Besides me, obviously.

This is what happens when you build your mental fortress when you are far too young to do a proper job of it. Most people have some sort of protection from the world, but it is more sophisticated and efficient. It lets most things in instead of blocking most things out.

Recovery, then, feels to me like I am demolishing my fortress brick by brick so I can replace it with a more robust and sophisticated way of dealing with the world.

Because the thing is, there is not a lot you can do with a fortress except hide in it. It keeps the rest of the world away, so even if you are lonely there in the tiny safe room in the middle of your fortress, your efforts to end that loneliness will forever be thwarted by your own inaccessibility.

You can’t go blaming the world for not reaching you when you have made yourself so hard to reach. You have to be willing to meet people at least halfway. You can’t get mad at people for not being willing or able to brave your fortress’ intricate maze of dangers and illusions just for a chance to maybe reach you.

Sure, you can say “Well if they really loved me, they would do it”, but be reasonable. That is a hell of a tight screening process.

It makes me wonder just how much of my life’s loneliness has been, in a sense, self-imposed. How many people were there outside my fortress, trying to get in, but having no idea how to do it?

I shudder to think. And all the time, I am as lonely as a cloud. Two world desperate to combine but separated by a fortress thick with ice and snow.

But slowly, I melt.

And as always, I feel I am becoming more and more of a real person. Of course, to the world, I am as real as anyone else.

But from inside, I feel fake and wooden and hollow. My abject lack of adult life experience combined with the effects of my depression makes me feel like I don’t really exist. Like I am only one or at best two dimensions of a real person, caught in one of the longest frozen childhoods in existence.

It’s tragic, really. But I try not to think about that too much. I am trying to be the kind of person who always looks forward into the future, and for whom each new day is an opportunity to decide who you really are.

We do not need to be defined forever by our existing contexts. We can become the people we wish to be, a better version of ourselves, if we make the right choices.

You just have to ask yourself, what sort of person do I want to be?

And then make the choices that person would make.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.