You know I’ll explain that.

What I mean by “I don’t know how to be enough” is that I don’t know what it is like to feel like you are a whole and decent person. I have had a vast and terrible sense of insufficiency and inadequacy for my entire life, more or less, and I can’t imagine what it is like to live my life without it there.

All my life, I have felt like there is something abjectly wrong with me and because of this flaw, I can never actually hold my own in society. I have no choice but to hope someone takes pity on me and helps me despite my pathetic nature, and that leaves me in a perpetual state of unworthy gratitude.

It is one thing to feel helpless. It is another thing entirely to feel like you don’t even deserve that help. That you are not worth helping, and that anyone who helps you is therefore taking on more than they can possibly handle and you should feel ashamed for how much damage you are doing to them.

And, of course, incredibly grateful that anyone ever helps you, unworthy as you are.

I feel like that’s my role in the world. Obviously, this is because that was my role in my family, as it seemed to me. I cannot honestly tell you how much of that was based on the reality of how I was treated and how much of it was the product of my rather broken mind, but I can tell you that was sure how I felt.

When you can’t ask for things, hope and gratitude are all that you have left.

I am not sure where the feeling that I could never be self sufficient came from, though. It’s not like I lacked the skills. Between looking after myself as a kid and learning a lot of things the hard way when I was in college, I have had all the basics covered for quite a while.

I suppose it’s the depression talking. It makes me feel so very weak and incapable. But even in college, my brother did most of the actual housework.

I am still ashamed of that. I had no excuse for that. But it’s the role I slipped into because it was the role I was used to. Like I have said here before, nobody wanted to take the time to teach me to do things the way they wanted them done, so I never had a lot of chores.

I did dishes. That was about it.

I guess the machine had been built years before I was ever born, and nobody felt like it was worth their time to make a space for me so I could help maintain it.

Nobody was keen to make room for me at all, come to think of it. No wonder I felt unwelcome. All my life I’ve been an afterthought at best, a nuisance most of the time, a resented burden at worst.

Or so it seemed to me.

Now I will admit, I was a clumsy kid who did not learn physical things quickly. And because of this, I was usually quite scared during the process. It would have taken effort and patience and time to teach me these things.

And those are three things people have never been willing to spare me. Easier to just ignore me. It’s not like I’d insist people paid attention to me.

And of course, when you feel like you have to learn a skill fast or people will lose interest and give up on you, that makes you all the more freaked out when someone tries and the less likely you will be able to beat the clock at all.

So given all that, I guess it’s no surprise that I feel so incapable. When it comes to the business of life, I truly feel like I can’t do it and any attempt to do it will only end up creating a potentially disaster-level mess someone else will end up having to fix and I will end up wishing I had never even tried.

That is the rape that is always cued up in my head on that subject, ready to play.

I do feel like I may have some minor learning disability when it comes to learning the physical. It’s very hard for me. I pretty much just have to keep trying by myself till I get it. I have a very poor track record when it comes to learning from explanations offered by others.

That’s how I learned to ride a bike. A lot of people tried to help, but they ended up just making me super anxious for reasons that should now be obvious, and it was only after they all left that I was able to figure it out on my own.

And for that, you need the freedom to fail. You have to feel like it’s safe to get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right. And I can’t recall ever feeling that way when anyone else was around.

Pop culture is filled with images of parents teacher their children to ride a bake. The implication is that the parent sticks with them over a long period of time. first with the training wheels, then eventually without.

I can’t imagine having anyone like that in my life. Nobody has ever had that kind of patience and tolerance with me. Maybe if someone had, I would have been able to calm down enough to learn these things and gained the confidence that brings.

But right now, honestly, I just plain feel like I can’t do it. My best hope is that I can use my other skills to someday be able to play someone to take care of me rather than relying on the kindness of others.

Maybe then I will finally feel like a decent and worthy human being, instead of a parasite.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.