Tomorrow is my last day of class. I am totally not ready for this.

then again, nobody ever is. Sometimes, life just happens to you, ready or not, and your challenge is to deal with it.

Today’s classes went okay. I had a long chat with my teacher Kat and she made me feel a lot better about my abysmal VFS career. She reassured me that my writing is very good, and that, at to her, my main problem is that I’ve no idea what effect I am having on others.

And she’s right.

I have known that for a while now, actually. I spent such a long time locked in my own echo chamber, believing my extraordinarily distorted perceptions represented reality, that I don’t really have a sense of how others truly feel about me.

It’s part of my being almost totally oblivious to my surroundings. Some of those surroundings are people.

I fought this revelation at first. After all, I am Mister Sensitive, right? I am always worrying the effect I am having on others. To a fault, really…. it means I put other people’s emotions ahead of mine and it makes it very hard to simply be myself.

But then I realized that it was not a matter of sensitivity. It’s a matter of awareness. I am sensitive to everything I perceive. But that tends to be limited to verbal stimuli. I can hear shades of emotion in people’s voices, grasp what is going on in subtext, and so forth and so on. But body posture and facial expression? Not nearly so sensitive. In fact, I often have trouble maintaining eye contact with people because I hate seeing myself in what I think is their judging, hating, resenting eyes.

This self-loathing thing runs very, very deep in me. I have mentioned this before, I think, but I spent many years unable to even look myself in the mirror, because if I did, a huge wave of self-loathing would rise in me and I would want to kill the person in the mirror.

And it’s still not easy. I have a huge mirror in my bathroom and I rarely look into it, even though it covers so much wall that the only place it doesn’t reflect is the shower. I still feel that burning self-hatred when I see myself most of the time. I have to take slow, careful looks at myself with my psychological defenses up. That’s the only way I can restrain the hate I feel for the…. thing that I am.

It gets better over time, though. My self-esteem has risen over the time since I started Kwantlen because, even though I keep screwing up, the fact that I was competent enough to make it through class day after day despite the physical effort and the much, much greater psychological strain of overcoming my agoraphobia and social anxiety each and ever day in order to get my ass to class.

That kind of thing is not to be ignored. It’s a huge deal for me to go out in public, amongst strangers, every single day. I had to overcome a lot to get to where I am right now, days away from graduation. Sure, I might not have comported myself in an ideal way, but I overcame a serious disability to get to VFS and to complete my course there.

Viewed that way, it’s pretty amazing that I made it this far.

And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I did not manage to both get my education and overcome my biggest psychological hurdle,namely learning to fit in. I couldn’t learn it as a child being bullied in elementary school and I still haven’t learned it at the age of 43. There is a hell of a lot of panic and anxiety and self-loathing in the way, and underneath all that, there is the social damage that a lifetime of isolation has caused me.

I grew up alone. That should never happen to any child ever.

It’s a hurdle I want to overcome for a number of reasons, from the purely professional to the deeply personal. I don’t want to be so isolated. I don’t want to be a lonely planet too far away from its star to get any warmth from it. I want to live a robust, engaged, connected life where I share in the common feeling and become a part of humanity instead of freezing to death in the vacuum of space.

I am tired of being on the outside looking in, afraid to try to come inside because freezing to death is better than being rejected and cast out into the cold again. Plus I don’t want to poison other people with my infernal toxicity.

After all, contact with me can only make life worse for people, right? And they know it, too, which is why they do their best to avoid dealing with me.

I’m hard to deal with and easy to ignore. So I get ignored.

Even today, when I made suggestions in class, most of them went over like a lead balloon. Actually, I take that back. A lead balloon would get more attention.

Instead, the things I say don’t fit in people’s minds and they just blink and move on like I had never said a damned thing. Teachers have told me that they think I contribute really good ideas. But if that’s true, they have a funny way of showing it.

I really don’t know what I am doing wrong. So it must be one of those things that comes with proper socialization – a sense of what people can and cannot understand. I have the verbal skills for that but not the social ones.

The only cure is social exposure. But clearly that won’t do it by itself, because I have had tons of it since the day I started Kwantlen, and I am still a lonely planet.

Clearly, some door within me has to open and let the sunshine in. Let myself be changed by the social inputs I get. Do my best to catch up.

I have been frozen for so very long.

I hope I can thaw out before the frostbite kills me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. Period.

After all, it’s not like I will have any homework!