And I want to know why.

Throughout my life, for as long as I remember, when people try to get close to me or when I try to get close to others, I always end up pulling back and the closeness never quite happens.

You can see how that might contribute to my depression.

It is like there is a wall, invisible but impenetrable, that sets a hard limit as to how close I can actually get to another person. As much as I crave a deeper connection to others, this wall keeps them out.

Underneath the wit and the warmth and the understanding of others, I am as hard and cold and slick as a half-melted iceberg.

I can handle relationships up to the medium-close friends stage. It’s not an easy road between pleasant acquaintance and medium close friend. It takes a lot of time for me to open up to people and trust that I can be myself, more or less, around them without them bolting for the hills.

Harder still is to convince me that someone won’t hurt me. I am a very tender and sensitive fellow, for better and for worse, and that means that people can hurt me in a lot of ways that are neither standard nor obvious. So the sort of person I let get close to me has to be at least somewhat similar. It takes a sensitive person to understand a sensitive person.

But then there’s that wall. I really can’t imagine what lies beyond it. I think it’s safe to say that this wall has been up for nearly my entire life, and so I am simply incapable of imagining what it would like if it wasn’t there.

Here I sit, in my frozen palace, trying desperately to send enough warmth into the world so that I can feel it through the ice when it reflects back at me.

So wither the wall? Where did it come from? What has it done to me? What does it do for me? And can it ever be breached?

The obvious answer as to its origin is that it is the scar tissue from many a childhood trauma, both active and passive. I faced both active persecution and passive isolation as a child, in great amounts, and every time I tried, in my slow shy way, to reach out to others, all I got was hurt.

But why? Why did that never work out? There were kids who really tried to befriend me along the way. But I couldn’t let them in. Instead, I left them behind. Why? Why couldn’t I connect?

The big issue was always compatibility. My intellect, my upbringing, my just plain weirdness… all these things made it very hard for me to relate to other kids, and of course, vice versa.

I just wasn’t like them. That made it hard for me to connect with them.

But I think there was something more at play. Looking back, I feel like I was, without knowing it, looking for something. What that something might be, I don’t know. But when someone would try to get close to me, I would open one suspicious eye in the trembling and forlorn hope that this person might be the one I was looking for, and then close it again in disappointment when it turns out they were not.

I pulled back.

Granted, some of the people who tried to befriend me ended up turning on me. I think they realized what a strange burden they had acquired by connecting to such an odd, wimpy, socially clueless kid. From the point of view of the average kid, I was not exactly a social asset. I had my signature mix of being painfully shy and being bold as brass even back then, and I can imagine how that made me kind of hard to read, let alone predict.

So while my intentions were always good, I probably ended up hurting people purely by accident. I didn’t know my own strength, verbally and intellectually speaking, and coupled with social obliviousness and a certain kind of cutting wit, and I was quite the bundle of problems and contradictions as a kid.

But I think that, even before that, I tended to pull back. Before I ever set foot in a classroom, back when life was good and I had friends and a babysitter and more attentive parents and siblings, I was still shy and hesitant, and I feel like even with my very first friends, Trish from next door and Janet from across the street, I was always holding back, keeping my distance, and never truly fully committing to or connecting with the friendship.

So what gives? Was I born with such a strong need for independence that I absolutely have to stay detached from everything? Why must there be this holy of holies chamber inside me that nothing can ever breach?

I think it is fundamentally about identity. I simply cannot dissolve my identity into a group identity. The thought alone strikes me with fear. It seems like death, or smothering. It gives me that claustrophobic feeling of clutching panic.

And without that ability to let go, there can never been more than a certain amount of closeness with anybody. There can never be an “us”. There can only ever be “me and you”.

The origin of this identity panic is uncertain. Perhaps it is simply the predictable outcome of a lack of social connection at a crucial stage in my development. Chimps raised in isolation fear and hate other chimps when they are introduced to them. They will never learn to relate to the other chimps at all. A vital window of opportunity has been missed.

Maybe that’s true for me as well. Perhaps the part of me that is capable of reaching out to others and truly connecting with them withered away and died a long time ago, and what is left of me will never get it back.

I have never felt part of a group.

I wonder what that’s like.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.