Phrenectomy

 I am so lonely, I am now realizing. Not that this is unusual, I am a lonely person, and always have been. But I’m just now coming to terms with how lonely I actually am. I have historically been a quality-over-quantity person when it comes to friends. I never cared that I didn’t have as many friends as everyone else, because the people who were/are my friends were there for me. But it takes so much more than that. I feel very isolated in an emotional sense. I feel highly misunderstood. Even if people give it a good, honest attempt at understanding me, they always fall short. It’s not their fault, nor is it mine. It’s just a fact of life at this point. There is nothing more I can do to elucidate further who I am as a person. I am doing everything I can and then some just for the chance that someone will eventually understand me. It feels like no one wants to meet me halfway. I am always so eager to get to know a person’s every nook and cranny, but why isn’t anyone as eager to know me? Why do people take others at face value? Is it because it’s easier to categorize people into “good” and “bad” people that way? We shouldn’t even be categorizing people like that. Black and white thinking is dangerous in any capacity. I don’t think we should be projecting it onto others as much as we do. Or at all. I feel as though people take one single glance at me from the corner of their eye and assume some sort of narrative about me based on how I look, or what I say, or the way I say it. No one actually wants to know the real story; they want whatever fantasies or twisted versions of the truth to be gospel. Is this my fault? Is there something wrong with me that makes everyone so resistant to understanding me and seeing me as I truly am? As I said, I go halfway and then some, trying to get people to hear me and get what I’m saying. There are very few people I find who can actually make sense of my existence, and I value those people deeply. I get whiplash the way I’ve been pedestalized, then demoted immediately when it turns out I am not what someone imagined I was. I’m not even a bad person. If we’re being honest, I love myself. I really enjoy spending time with myself. I think I’m quite the catch. But if I’m anything other than the narrative imposed upon me, that pedestal falters. And that doesn’t apply exclusively to the pedestalization to depedestalization pipeline. It applies to people who meet me and right off the bat hate my very existence. If I am not the demonic entity they have assigned me to in their mind, that means that maybe they were wrong about me. And people don’t like to be wrong. So they dislike me further, creating more and more imaginary fuel for their torches and sharpening their pitchforks. The duality of these two types of interactions leaves me feeling completely isolated, entirely misunderstood, fundamentally unlovable, and wholly soured about humanity as a whole. I have deemed myself “people intolerant” as of late. Since around November, I’ve become increasingly more irritable, but only in the social aspects of my life. As someone who experiences irritability as a symptom of anything and everything, I’ve learned to identify the issue pretty quickly, and what I’ve noticed is that this frustration stems from one thing: other people. It’s an external problem; it’s not a problem I can fix. I can choose the ways in which I react to this problem, I can choose the type of person I am in the face of this problem, but I cannot change the facts. The lack of control in this situation is driving me mad; it’s making me angry. I cannot change other people. I cannot force them to empathize with me. I cannot make them understand me. Hell, I can’t even get them to want to be around me at this point. And it’s comfortable that way. I have become accustomed to feeling alienated and alone my whole life, and as a result, my social battery dies fast and hard and takes multiple weeks to recharge in more extreme situations. But that’s okay, I need my 18+ hours of alone time every day. To be honest, trying as hard as I do to be heard and understood fully is equally exhausting. I find the firmer I grasp the notion of being seen, the more it slips from my grip. I feel like an ancient codex in a long-lost language. Maybe I’m overly dramatic, maybe it’s the schizophrenia. Maybe both. All I know is, I have felt like this since I can remember. Lonely. I’ve had periods, however brief, of relating to other people and feeling related to. But it’s the absence of that sort of relation that drives me fucking insane, and it’s the fact that these days, I talk to people, and I feel so far removed from the rest of humanity that I can’t relate to a single thing people do anymore. I’ve always lived under a rock, so maybe I don’t understand trends and such in their wholeness. But holy shit, I just do not understand the general public anymore. On an individual level, I have a much easier time relating to others. But as a whole, society sees me as irredeemable, and I see society as equally detestable. All that’s just to say that if you haven’t heard from me as frequently, or at all, I am just working things out behind the scenes. I am trying hard to be a real person again, and not this horrible curmudgeon I’ve become.