This song has been stuck in my head all day.

 

Specificaklly, the part at the end where the background singers are singing :

Everybody needs somebody
Everybody needs someone
Everybody needs somebody
You’re not the only one
You’re noit the only one

Well I might not be the only one.

But I’m the lonely one/

Despite my friends, both the in person kind and the over the Internet kind, I am still a very lonely man.

That doesn’t mean they have failed me or done anything wrong. It just means that I have the kind oif damage that can’t be reached by the usual sort of friendship. That sort of thing, wondrous and cherished as it is, only goes so deep.

And under that, I am a broken and lonely person roaming the endlress tundra of my frozaen soul, looking for sources of warmth but often too numb from the cold to feel anything more than the feeblest of warmth from them.

It’s taken me a while to realize this. I didn’t want to face it. And nut just because I felt it would seem like insulting ingratitude to those who care for me.

The truth is that realzing my own lonely nature meant facing to face a basic human need so massively unmet that to even contemplate it makes it seem like a vast black plane of broken ebony, hostile to life and colder than the depths of space.

And to touch it would be to die. It would swallow my feeble flame and the void would finally claim me. The darkness would finally finish the job of killing me and I would be no more. Like I’d never existed at all.

Cue my “It’s A Wonderful Life” sequence.

Oh look, it turns out everyone was a lot happier. that way.

This loneliness eats away at me constantly. It’s hard to truly encompass the sheer scope of it. It’s like I have been starving for my entire life without thinking about it, having shoved the hunger into a dark corner of my mind. And it’s only now, as I slowly emerge from the dank and dirty cave of my depression, that I realize how fucking hungry I am and how I honestly have no idea how to go about getting food.

As patient readers know, I missed most of the socialization one is supposed to get as a child. I was a lonely kid locked away in my lonely world of books, comics, TV, and video games. For long periods I had no friends whatsoever. I was at the bottom of the social totem pole – to the point where even the retarded kids made fun of me.

That really hurt.

And that whole time, instead of falling apart or crying out for help or in some way let the people who cared about me know that I was miserable, I just hid it all under a surface pleasantness and buoyancy that reassured the world that there was no problem, that everything was fine, and that noboby need to worry about me.

Not because that was true. It was, in fact, the polar opposite of the truth. But that was my role in life. To be the kid who’s easy to forget and ignore. The kid who never asks for anything. The kid who is happy with whatever he gets. The kid who always goes along with whatever is easiest for others.

The kkid more than willing to help you forget you ever had him.

My siblings do not – cannot – understand this. Because, as I have said before, you don’t remember ignoring something. Especially when that something is someone whom the entire family structurre treats as unimportant and without merit. Someone who seems complicit in their own utter lack of status.

Someone who is weird and sort of icky and who in no way will penalize your ignoring him, so you just do with what’s easiest, which is forgetting about him most of the time.

And when he does remind you of his existence, whether or not it’s his choice, you then react as if he’s annoying you just by existing because before he spoke up, he didn’t exist to you at all. And you convey that irritation with him via a clipped, angry tone of voice and the undertone of a constant weary put-upon sigh that underlies every word you speak. You make it abundantly clear that you are mad at him for reminding you that he exists and that you want to go back to forgetting all about him as soon as possible.

That’s what my childhood was like. So it’s no wonder I gave up on myself. Everyone else had. And that’s why I locked myself away from the world and retreated into the ice palance of the world of the mind and tried, as best I could, to stay there all the time.

A baby can only cry for so long before it realizes nobody is coming.

Then it stops. And despair sets in.

It’s only in this late phase of my life that I can look back and see how wrong it all was. And I don’t mean merely in a simple moral sense. It was wrong in a deeper sense of being the opposite of what should happen. It’s wrong in that it’s the sort of thing that is not supposed to happen.

It’s wrong like fish falling out of the sky is wrong. That’s not supposed to happen,. That’s not even supposed to be possible.

And yet, here I am, living the life that resulted from it.

And the wghole time, I pretended that everything was fine because it was clearly what people wanted me to say so they could go right back to forgetting all about me with the minimum of effort wasted on dealing with me.

And oit was clearly the only answer permitted. If I said anything else, people reacted with shock and irritation, like I had just appeared in a burst of flame and demanded their firstborn and a sack of gold.

That was not in the script. That was not allowed. They had not allocated any mental resources to dealing with any problem I might have and they damned well we’re going to change that now. Not for someone so absolutely devoid of merit, worth, or status.

After all, any resource spent on the worthless is a waste, right?

Books. Video games. Comics. TV.

It’s a miracle that I made it this far at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.