If Wishing Made It So…

What the fuck am I doing here? I keep asking myself that. I’ve lost it again – that thin veneer of twisted illusion and compulsive behavior that I use to shield myself from the truth. There’s no way to make the things I’ve done, and the things I am, ok. I will never again have a genuine interaction with another person. I will always have to pretend, with everybody, aware that if they really knew me, they would be repulsed. Nobody will like me for who I am, ever. I miss that feeling. The hope that who you are really matters to someone else. Love. There will be no relationships. No intimacy. Only pretense, exploiting others for the sake of social acceptance. Anyone who I befriend I deceive.

So what the fuck am I doing here? Ending my life would cause a great deal of pain to my family, who I care about. But continuing it means accepting this half-life, this pale shadow existence. No hope. No friendship. No joy. Nothing to care about. I’m so tired of trying to make the best of this impossibly deep pit I’ve dug for myself.
There’s no way to make any of this right. Even killing myself wouldn’t make it right. It would just create another kind of wrong, and I don’t know which is worse. My mind is in limbo.

I want to go back. I shouldn’t say that. The past is the past. No point crying over spilled milk. But still. I want a do over. To go back to before I became this waste of life, and change something.

But the truth is, run the tape again and you’d get the exact same result. My personality was never going to be well adjusted for the realities of the world.

Maybe if you’d intervened early enough you could have toughened me up a little. Socialized me better. Made me more resilient to setbacks. Taught me to be more assertive and confident. To spend less time in imaginary worlds and staring at clouds and more time focused on the people around me. Discouraged me from too much self-doubt or questioning of societal norms.

You might have ended up with a decent guy. Maybe he’d be happily married by now, with kids, a mortgage, and a productive career. But the only similarity between him and me would be DNA. Who I am, my way of thinking about and approaching the world, is so fundamentally dysfunctional that it permeates right to the core of my being. Strip away all the fears, anxieties, guilt, and addictions, and there’s nothing else left. The way my entire mind works is maladaptive. This is who I really am. Without it, I would have no way of operating in the world.

But still, I find myself wanting a do over. I want to wake up and find that the last 20 years were all a bad dream. That the world still seems an exciting place full of beauty and wonder. That any anxieties are transitory, and reality is a safe place to be, containing nothing worse than a grazed knee. That I still have my whole life ahead of me. I want the truth wiped from my mind. My guilt expunged from the universe.

But what that would really necessitate is ‘me’ never have existed. What the fuck am I doing?