sloth progress sucks

I feel like I've made all this progress in recent years, and yet there's something horrifying about it. I've come far enough to be around normal people, even going to their picnics and the like. I interact with them, strangers become acquaintances, meeting new people all the time. This basic social process they all take for granted, I went my entire adult life without. 

For me, this can feel like major progress, but it also puts me face to face with how far I still have to go, to be anything like them. Some kind of respectable functioning adult. Progress gives me perspective, the ability to plot a trajectory, and realize that I'm not going to make it.

What does this mean, to be a respectable functioning adult? Why does it matter? Is it all about what other people think? What if they are right to think it?

I may not really understand this, but from what I can tell, as we become adults, we are motivated by what we want out of life, and the independence to obtain it. We are all constrained in various ways, but being a "functioning adult" isn't just about living up to societal norms. It's the self-actualization of growing to pursue our own needs and wants.

I'm such a tangle of neurosis and anxieties, so meek and reticent about everything that I never get around to doing anything. I barely even think in terms of what I want, only in what I'll never have, any potential motivation stifled before it even becomes conscious. The correlation between desire and motivation is interesting. If someone is unmotivated, maybe we should talk about what they want, and why it doesn't seem possible. 

Unmotivated, stunted, unable to pursue anything I want in life, this is not how I want to live at all. It's dysfunctional, pathetic, and childish. I just sit here day after day, because the world scares me. Some things never change? My progress feels lacking. I have a lot further to go than I'd thought. Further than I'd been able to admit to myself. I've only made enough progress to realize I'm more fucked than I'd realized.

If only I could get some help, if only things would go right for once, I think, only for life to kick my in the face again. I've had a lot of health problems lately. Finally getting over one thing only to be hit with another. Haven't been able to throw any punches with my left arm for a few weeks now, but it's getting better. I'm afraid my age is catching up with me, my trajectory at ever increasing risk of nose-diving.

I'd stopped intermittent fasting almost a year ago, because while its benefits are dubious, my need for calories is less so. Maybe it really was helping though. I've started that again. I've been running almost every day, while I can't get to the gym. I find ways to stay positive out of a desperate fear of inevitable backslide into the abyss I spent my whole life trying to crawl out of. Now I'm losing my apartment too, and I can't afford anywhere else to live.

I used to complain that a single lifetime wasn't going to be enough, but I'd always hoped I was wrong. Life comes at you fast. I wasn't ready.