hikikomori

All my life, I've felt different, unable to form connections with others. I've felt isolated and alone, in personal relationships, and in rooms full of people. In recent years, I've come to think maybe the problem was never that I'm different. Regardless of whether or not I really am all that different, maybe that was not the impediment. It's a story I've been telling myself since I was a little kid, but not without reason.

More likely, the problem was within me, responses to childhood trauma; defenses I'd had to learn, to wall myself off from people. It's been like being locked in solitary, my entire life. Sometimes people visit, but nobody can get me out. I get stuck on martial arts because it was the exception. I felt a sense of connection when I'd spar and grapple. A way out of solitary. The only way I've known. 

I've often wondered if finding a good sparring partner would even provide sufficient basis for a friendship. Good sparring is fairly demanding criteria in itself, but it was looking far more attainable than whatever else I was looking for. Even if I never felt much of a connection with any of the other students individually, I felt a sense of community and camaraderie with all of them. Ever so slowly, I was also getting better at the individual interactions of more verbal nature.

In a broader sense, I've always been a more physical person than I like to admit. I've always preferred throwing kicks to reading a book. I've been watching all sorts of dumb action on Netflix. Not that I can't appreciate other genres, but I gravitate towards a lot of monster fighting silliness and I'd rather be the one fighting the monsters. The hobbies I've stuck with have been the simplest. I cook because I like to eat. I grow peppers, because I like to cook. I've enjoyed connecting with people and the world more physically, in simple terms of senses and instincts.

Simply hearing people talk can immediately elicit feelings of alienation, before they've said much of anything. Trying to reply, even more so. Appropriate and healthy neural connections are not being made, but this can be a matter of conditioning and experience. In time, with practice, maybe I'd relax and get better at it.

I was trying, but instead, I've spent the last year locked away in my apartment, getting worse by the day. Back to the old self I never really got away from. I don't want to find some way to come to terms with this. I refuse to be ok with living like this ever again.