Contemplating Death

Let me start this off by saying that I don’t have a bad life. I have two loving parents. I have a brother, a sister, and a sister in law who all love me. I also have a niece and many aunts, uncles, and cousins who love me. Yet, I still feel alone. I feel like nothing I do matters. I feel like I’m drowning in the ocean and every once in a while I catch some air, only to be forcibly dragged back down into the current.
I am not a horrible looking person but I refuse to live the “social norm” that people tend to follow these days. I am excessively hairy and I have accepted that. The only reason I don’t shave my body hair is because, as I learned from my facial hair, as it grows, it becomes unbearably itchy. I know that there are people out there who only care what’s on the inside, but I have yet to meet anyone like that. There are three main reasons why I feel so miserable.
School
The problem is that I am not a very social person. I have trouble calling and texting my mother. I always feel as if I’m being a burden to other people, so instead, I keep to myself. It all started in grade school. I remember asking the teacher for some help and he just stared at me like a deer stares into oncoming head lights. While he did ask if I needed anything later, it was already too late by then; I had given up on the project.
Then we moved across country into the Deep South. If had few friends before, I had even fewer now. In middle school I was an outcast. I was the boy with perfect attendance who nobody cared about, nobody talked to, and nobody liked. I was made fun of, poked fun at, and basically bullied. High school did little to boost my confidence. I was bullied only during my freshman year, had other problems by then. I was forced to change schools do to overcrowding. Basically, I went to three different high schools. In all of school I had only a single friend. I met him in middle school and we stayed friends well after I graduated high school. There was one girl in high school that, like me, was transferred to all three schools. We had classes together a lot. Despite her attempts; however, I failed to initiate any kind of friendship.
After high school I needed a break, so I stayed at home, with my parents, for two years before finally going off to school again. The school I went to was five minutes from my house. Because of this, I stayed at home with my parents who I have lived with all my life. I am now 29. After I graduated from college I tried to get a job in my field for a while (computer animation) but I found that, in order for me to get a job in the field I need to have 3 to 5 years of experience, and since I don’t have the experience, I can’t get the jobs. While there are some “entry level” jobs available, I’ve never really had a passion to pursue it. I wasn’t that good at it anyway.
Work
After college, things seemed to get worse for me. The one friend I had left me because I wasn’t as religious as him. I got fired from my job (which I hated anyway, so no real complaints) and got a new one almost right away. Then I got another job a year later. I was working two jobs, and making lots of money. That was the only upside to this period. After three years or so the one of the places closed down and I was down to only one job.
All wasn’t bad at first. I would get raises and more hours all the time. Then the national financial crisis hit. My hours plummeted. Since then, every summer I have had to work only three days a week. And even though I have been with the company for eight years now, my shyness prevents me from saying anything about it. While I still get paid well, and could scrape by should the need arise, it’s not work I want to be doing for the rest of my life.
The career path I have chosen for myself has the potential to rake in a lot of money. The problem is that it is insanely hard to get, and even if you do, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that you will either do really well, or really bad. I have confidence in myself, that, one day (possibly after I am dead) I will become famous. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald “Writing is a dog’s life, but it’s the only life for me.”
Love
At 29 years old I am beginning to lose faith that love exists for me at all. I have never had sex. I have never had a girlfriend. I have never kissed a girl. If not for Facebook, I wouldn’t even have any friends. (Thank God for Facebook). Most of my friends however live across country or across state (which is about a six hour total drive there and back). The one or two friends that I have that don’t live far away often spend most of their time working. I go and see them at work when I can, but I don’t know their schedules, so it can be a hit or miss. If I wasn’t so shy and afraid to call them, I might be able to figure it out.
I go out at least once a week and try to meet people; only to fail every time because I’m too afraid to talk to anybody. The rest of the time I am up in my room, in my parent’s house, keeping to myself. I try to play videogames to ease the pain I feel, but even they are losing their luster for me. I’ve tried online dating sites and the one person who might have had interest on me, I flaked out on. In truth my subscription expired and I did not want to renew.
Even when I do finally build up the courage to talk to someone, some natural force of nature seems to take them away from me. For example: I have been taking a yoga class at the gym for maybe a year now. There was one girl there who was really cute. I started to open the door for her and she would smile at me. After a while she started to smile at me whenever she saw me. This built up my confidence enough to talk to her. We had a, what I thought, was a good conversation. I had hoped to build up that conversation more in the next class. I waited all week with high hopes. Then, when Saturday came I went to class only to find that she wasn’t there. I haven’t seen her since.
 

I see people all around me holding hands and kissing. It doesn’t help to build up my confidence. People talk all the time about how they “don’t want to see people of the same sex kissing”, well I don’t want to see people of the opposite sex kissing either. I don’t want to see people holding hands. I don’t want to see them dating. Mass murderers and serial killers are often created because they don’t feel loved. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I feel like I’m headed down that path. When some of my friends post that they broke up on Facebook I know I should feel bad for them, but I don’t. I feel nothing.
Winter and spring are the worst times for me. I should be happy that come January 1 I get a fresh start. It makes no difference because I never change. Then comes spring, and, rather than feeling better, it makes me feel worse, and it has nothing to do with my allergies. Spring is when women start wearing dresses and bathing suits and when you start to see the baby bump on woman’s bellies. The only joy I get out of spring is knowing that my neighbor, a sixteen or seventeen year old girl, will be outside sunbathing in a bikini. Before anyone jumps to any conclusions let me say that I will NEVER date a girl under the age eighteen. That being said, I still enjoy the occasional glimpse of my neighbor. That’s as far as it will ever go though.
My work “friends” all talk about how they hope to get lucky with a girl they know, or how they get laid every night. One of my work friends got laid the weekend of my birthday. MY birthday! I should be the one getting laid on MY birthday NOT him. Just knowing that someone else got MY birthday gift makes me feel like $#!%. What’s the point of having a penis if I don’t get to use it? Every once in a while, when things start to get really bad, I have to give myself some ‘self-loving’. That helps to ease the tension, but not to better my mood.
I’m beginning to lose faith in myself. I don’t know how much more failure and rejection I can take. All I have left to hold on to is hope. Hope that one day, I will become a novelist and make enough money to support myself and my future wife (who I will only have met because of my being a writer.) If I lose my hope, though, I lose everything, and that scares me. I tell myself that I want to live every day. I tell myself that things will change. I try to be a positive person. But the truth is, nothing changes. Everything stays the exact same. I can’t breathe any more. The ocean has dragged me under again, and I don’t want to come back up again.