First : I contribute. I am not a burden. I am a worthy human being who has nothing to be ashamed of and who deserves everything good in life. My illness might make me an invalid sometimes but it doesn’t invalidate me. I am just another person with burdens.

Like I said before, I am going to keep on affirming that stuff daily until I am convinced that I have pounded it deep enough into my skull for it to take hold and grow.

Right now, I want to tackle my fee;ling of not being a real person. Of illegitamacy.

We will start at the basics : obviously, viewed from the outside, I am as real, legitimate, and as much of a person as anyone else.

I know this feeling of mine is crazy. That doesn’t make it go away.

Clearly this belief is the product of my mental illness. But let’s parse it a little deeper and see what we can discover.

One layer : that deep feeling of emptiness that is the core of depression. This is a result of lack of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. In a healthy mind, this lack would simply be the root of motivations as it creates a feeling of lack that directs people towards making sure their needs are met.

But depression breaks that healthy cycle, and the craving becomes all-encompassing and universalized and impossible to satiate.

Going a little deeper, the next layer has to do with the terrible soul-crushing numbness that depression creates. This numbness has deep consequences beyond simply being a constant unpleasant feeling.

Reality tells us who and where we are via the feedback we get from our environment. It’s a complex feedback loop which would take a long time to explain, but for our purposes, we will just focus on the fact that the numbness of depression damps down that environmental feedback and leaves the depressive with a feeling of unreality.

Some depressives response to that numbness via self-herm, like cutting. This extreme self-therapy works because the pain and shock cut through the numbness and that gives the depression the long-craved feeling of reality.

Never went there myself. Glad I didn’t hear about it till I was an adult, though. I might have tried it when I was a depressed teen and there were times when I was so numb that I was capable of anything.

I feel the same way about school shootings.

My response to the terrible numbness was to question my own reality. That seems extreme,but the alternative was to doubt reality itself, and that seems like a much scarier and more dangerous path to me.

Thus we arrive at the next layer down : my own personal issues. My numbness resulted in my doubting my own reality because for a lot of my childhood, I was treated as if I was not there. I was ignored, and given the clear message that I should just be quiet and not remind people of my existance and try to stay out of the way at all times.

So no wonder I question my own existence. How you treat your kids becomes their entire reality, and so if you treat them like they don’t exist, they will believe you.

Nobody planned it that way and nobody ever told it to me either. But how you treat your kid weighs a hell of a lot more than anything you say to them.

Words can fuck them up too, though. Like being told you’re useless.

So from that craptastic childhood came a deep feeling of illegitimacy. Between my family, my teachers, and my classmates, so many people made it clear that they wished I didn’t exist that I started to imagine that I didn’t exist purely in self-defense.

In effect, they nullified me. Negated me. I had absolutely no right to exist.

And that’s the kind of thing that can really fuck with a guy.

This feeling of illegitamacy. ergo and therefore, has very deep roots in me. It goes all the way back to my early childhood and everything in my life after that seemed to confirm the notion that I didn’t exist and I wasn’t important and I deserved absolutely nothing , not even existance.

I mean, just think of all the other, worthier lifeforms that could be using the organic molecules currently being wasted by being forced to be me.

Part of me still feels that way. And excising that part of me will require giving it voice now and then, partly for emotional release, and partly to expose it to the powers of my rational mind and watch it wither and die in the sun, like a vampire.

It’s my favorite show, that. Would binge.

SO I hereby declare myself to be officially legitimate. Consider my life passport to be stamped, punched, and verified. I deserve to be here as much as anybody else, and at the risk of repeating myself, I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Not even the fact that I ended that with a preposition.

I have spent a lifetime feeling like I should be constantly apologizing for my very existence. I was an unplanned child and was treated like an unwelcome intrusion once the novelty wore off and people stopped being amazed and amused by how bright and cute I was.

No wonder I have such a strong drive to please and entertain and fascinate people. The withdrawal of attention at such an early age left me with a desperate need to get people to pay attention to me any way I can.

Attention is something I will crave till the day I die, more or less.

Part of me is trying to recapture that golden time where I got tons of positive attention and praise just for being myself.

Well. okay, maybe not. That actually sounds super creepy and irritating in an adult context. As an adult, I’d want praise for things I actually do.

I mean, sure, I want people to think I am brilliant and amazing, but there’s got to be more to it than that.

So in conclusion, I feel illegitimate for a lot of legitimate reasons.

But the feeling itself is as illegitimate as hell.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.