der steppenwolf

I try to write around this a lot, though I'm not sure I've been successful.  I've found it to be largely counter-productive.  Few understand or care and it is embarrassing.  This part of my psyche is so vulnerable, so I try to avoid discussion on the subject.  So here I am now, with my rambling lead in. Don't blink, you'll miss it.

I can talk about politics or music, but it's all distraction.  I don't really care about any of it, but it's a good distraction.  A puddle deep way of connecting that doesn't work as well if I don't compartmentalize the crushing loneliness that elicits all the wrong responses from people.. but this is what I'm really talking about when I say that I'm a failure.  This, my whole reason for dragging myself from each decade to the next, is what I've failed at.  At my age, it feels like a statement of past tense making all else pointless.

I've never cared about anything all that much, other than finding someone like me.  To share this crazy existence with a female of my species.  The most normal thing in the world, if only I were, as the humans say, neurotypical.  Everything else, I can adapt to.  I can take interest or not, whatever.  The world is all sorts of tragic, beautiful, and interesting with or without my engagement.  Sometimes I'll even say that I'm not clinically depressed or anxious, which is clearly untrue, but it feels like circumstance that would change in a heartbeat, if only I could find whatever the hell I'm looking for.

I'm inclined to say that this is itself the pathology, maybe even endocrinology.  I fixate on what would soothe my lifelong inability to connect, but I don't like to talk about it.  There isn't much point, except to say, please mind my feelings, here.  I'm not a monk.  I wish I could better explain what it means, that I can't relate.  I don't want anyone to take it personally, but it's particularly excruciating at the moment.  I'm not handing it well.

I feel this predicament gives me insight into how motivation itself actually works, so I usually try to comment on that instead.  Oxytocin, dopamine, reward pathways and how socialization plays into that.  Or how all that somehow plays into capitalism's failures.  Something distracting.  Sometimes it feels important to express what's actually going on in my head.

Sometimes compartmentalization breaks down and I'm just trying to sort through the mess.  Nurse my wounds, rebuild a few walls.  Sometimes this takes a while.  I thought this part of me had faded away years ago, but turns out I'd only buried it.  I've been confused by the force with which it reemerged, but maybe this has given me an opportunity to better work through it.

Human relationships can be very motivating.  I've had to figure out how to make do, given that I don't have any.