Posts Tagged ‘loneliness’
New Year Blues
Posted on: January 1, 2013
Let’s shoot some elephants
Posted on: May 22, 2011
The room is full of them.
Life goes on, I suppose.
Posted on: October 31, 2010
The past doesn’t seem real anymore. I think about events in my life and they strike me as things that happened to someone else.
I feel like I never went to uni. I talk about it, sometimes, about funny or interesting things that happened while I was there, about the people I knew, and it feels like a dream or a story someone once told me.
And really, I might as well have not gone, hadn’t I? I mean, I know that if I hadn’t, I would have regretted it. I would always be thinking, I could have done that – but I’d be wrong. I know that now. Four years of my life and I can hardly remember most of it, and I’m no longer in touch with the people I knew (what is it people say? The friends you make at university will last a lifetime), and I don’t even have a degree to show for it, letters I can put after my name as proof that I did something, proof that I was there. All I have is a gap in my employment history that to explain would mean to admit failure.
I feel like I’ve betrayed the person I used to be. I think of myself, all those years ago. All the aspirations I had. I was going to write books, or if that didn’t work out as quickly and as successfully as I hoped, I’d become a teacher. I was going to fall in love and be a mother. I was going to have a house of my own, and lots of friends. I was going to achieve something, even if I wasn’t quite sure what.
It’s stupid, isn’t it? Nothing in my life ever gave me any indication that I’d be able to do the things I dreamt of, and since dreaming them life has emphatically proven that I’m incapable.
In a way, I know that I’m being premature. Giving up too early. I’m 22 years old, and there’s still time for any or all of those things. But I can no longer see any of them happening, and I’m not even on the right path anymore. I know that, if this were a story, and I were the hero, I’d be more determined. I wouldn’t give up just because there were obstacles in my way. But it’s a long time since I’ve felt I’m the protagonist in this winding, plotless tale, and I’ve never felt like a hero.
I’ve never known how to try again. I’ve always been someone who tried once and then, on failing, quickly moved on, pretending the thing I’d tried for was worthless. If I fail once, I take it as a sign that I am neither capable nor deserving of success. And by that method I close every door, I cut off every path that’s available to me, and I stand in this same place, unable to move on.
I sit and wait, watching life trickle away, too quickly to change it but too slowly for comfort. I see my life as another thing I’ve tried to do, some task I’ve set myself to. And I failed, so all there is left to do is pretend it doesn’t matter and refuse to try again.
I’m not even sure any of that makes sense.
I don’t even really know how I feel, or what’s happening in my life.
I know that life at home is easy in all the ways that really matter – food on the table and a roof over my head, and I don’t have to worry about money. And I know that life at work is probably better than I had any right to hope for – not too taxing, relatively interesting, and surrounded by people I suppose I get on with.
But home is a struggle, always (and even back when I hoped to become a mother, I wonder if I’d ever be so selfish as to go through with it, knowing that there’s a chance I’d end up like my own, who sees her children as adversaries and inconveniences – lingering unpleasantnesses that she’d hoped to be free of long ago). And at work, there is too much time for chat, and it makes me uncomfortable. Already, I can see their puzzled glances. I’m never who I was the previous week. Everything I say and am seems to contradict everything they already know about me, and they have questions that I don’t know how to answer.
I sit in the dark and cry. I wake too early and fall asleep too late. The mask is in place permanently, and I have no time to be myself, to fall apart, without the fear of discovery. I’d call it a good thing, the enforced routine serving as a crude sketch of a life that maybe one day I will learn to live, but I feel myself becoming exhausted by pretense, and irritable with the people in whose presence I have to pretend.
I feel the weight that pushes down on my shoulders, and I see the walls that pen me in. I force a smile and carry on, and everything twists, and more parts of myself become irretrievable, and every day is another day I’ve lost forever, and another day I get to tick off in the excrutiatingly slow countdown to the end of my life.
It’s all I can do now, sit and wait, having neither the courage nor the energy to either end or change my life.
Silent
Posted on: October 8, 2009
The only conversation Ive had today – apart from a couple of ‘hello’s – lasted approximately 30 seconds, was with a total stranger, and was about trying to understand the mechanism of a drinks machine.
It’s not even that I’m hiding away. If you spoke to me, I’d probably speak back. But I don’t have anyone to speak to. Nobody volunteers to spend time with me, and I don’t know anyone well enough to force my company on them.
The words turn to dust. I have nothing to say anymore, because I have no-one to say it to. I am completely friendless, alone, frightened of everything. It all feels so pointless.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone, so disposable. A couple of friends from home have suggested that they’d like to visit some time, but I can’t let them see me like this. They’d know that something was wrong.
I don’t mind my own company, but being alone all the time is disheartening. Depressing, I suppose.
Friendship always used to come so easily. But I’ve lost the mechanism for that, like so many things. If I disappeared, no-one would notice. No-one would care.
I feel like I don’t really exist. I want to sleep. I don’t want to wake up. I took some sleeping pills (too many, but not a dangerous amount. I feel like dying but I’m not killing myself, not yet. I just want sleep – rest, respite, escape). They should start working soon.
I feel like I am drowning. I feel like I am suffocating. I feel unwanted, unneeded, surplus to requirements. I feel so terrifyingly alone.
I’m back.
Posted on: September 15, 2009
I’ve had a nice holiday, a good holiday. Not really an ideal holiday – depending on my state of mind, my ideal holiday consists of either a) me, some sunshine and a big pile of books, or b) me, my friends, a lot of friendly strangers and a lot of alcohol. Listening to my mother constantly worrying about things that haven’t happened yet, and even if they didn’t happen, wouldn’t be worth worrying about, isn’t likely to be something I want in a holiday.
But yes, it was nice. Read the rest of this entry »
Solitude.
Posted on: July 18, 2009
I am lonely, and troubled. I find it so difficult to make things better for myself when I feel like this; to contact people, to talk, to go out. Being alone is difficult, but somehow I feel that being with others would be more so.
I have jury duty next week, and am dreading it. I know that I have no choice, I know that I have to go, and I’m sure that when I get there it won’t be so bad as I feel now – I might not even have to be on a jury. I just feel worried about it now.
I’ve been reading ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, trying to take comfort in it, and in solitude. Words are a comfort, but they are not a solution. I’ve been reading, not just Rilke but huge amounts of other things, trying to find something in which to immerse myself, but neither the stories nor my concentration last quite long enough, and sooner or later I am plunged back into the real world. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry, too, because I don’t have to concentrate for so long, and it helps: words and thoughts and rhythm. It’s easier to live in others’ thoughts than my own.
I am so very lonely here. I see my friends occasionally – they’re working, or doing family stuff, a lot of the time, or seeing other friends, and only every now and again do we do anything together. When I do see them, I am happy in a way – happy in our comfortable, piss-taking informality. But it verges on the superficial and I feel, as ever, that I am merely acting. It’s not their fault, though, as I feel that way regardless of who I am with.
I am trying to be calm, trying to see my loneliness as a good thing – trying to change it from loneliness to aloneness. Trying to use it to grow, to be content. But in my heart, I know that that’s not really me – I am tense, restless.
I feel fragile. I am the weak, the breakable, but I am also my own guard. There is no-one else I’d trust to deflect awkward questions, to hide weakness and fragility and hopelessness. I used to think it made me a complete person – both strong and weak, both protector and protected – but lately I wonder if it’s just another elaborate lie. If my self-sufficiency is just another thinly-veiled weakness, just another warning light, telling the whole world that I can’t trust, I can’t relax, I can’t hope.
The silence of my inner world somehow says more than panicking, frantic thoughts could. There’s a gaping chasm somewhere within me, where the tiniest thought echoes, echoes, echoes until it is all I hear.
I feel light-headed – with tiredness, with sadness, with worry and confusion. Sometimes I feel like I am not a person but a vessel for all the bad qualities a person could have. I feel like, amongst the sadness, the selfishness and the loneliness, there is no redeeming humanity. Like I am not a person but a list of unpleasant traits.
Hi
Posted on: July 17, 2009
I wish I could write here about my ‘normal life’. You know, the day-to-day stuff that isn’t just about my mood and my own private inner life. But they’re inseperable. My mood is the coloured filter that I see the world through. I can’t talk about something I’ve done or something that happened to me without mentioning my mood because chances are that without my mood, either a) the thing wouldn’t have happened, or b) I wouldn’t care about it. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t feel great.
Posted on: July 13, 2009
In fact I’d go so far as to say I feel awful.
The past couple of days, I’ve slowed down almost to a stop. Still hardly sleeping but finding it more and more difficult to get out of bed. Feeling constantly on the brink of tears. Getting irritable with everyone. Wanting to be alone but resenting every minute of it. I’m moving slowly, talking quietly, struggling with everything. The lethargy infiltrates every moment, action and thought.
Trying to think straight whilst depressed is like trying to run with your legs tied together. I wish I could clear it, it’s like a fog that comes along and clouds up my brain until I find myself sitting around for ages without even thinking anything, and when I do think it’s just stupid, self-pitying bullshit.
I don’t want to be like this. There is no upside. It’s not interesting or cool. It’s just horrible. I want to be happy and cheerful and optimistic and hopeful. I don’t want every thought I ever have to sooner or later progress to thoughts of suicide. I don’t want it to feel like the first and most sensible option. I don’t want it to feel inevitable.
I want to think properly, and feel properly. I want ordinary happiness and ordinary sadness.
I want some fucking control.
But it won’t happen, of course. I won’t make it happen. And that is yet another reason to hate myself. Because I don’t want it, but I won’t fix it. Because I complain, but don’t change.
I’m spending huge amounts of my time in elaborate fantasy worlds, pretending I’m someone else, people I’ve made up. Just avoiding real life – but I can’t do that all the time.
I’m awful to be around. I’m dull and stupid and awkward. And I feel so isolated here. When I was at uni, even when I was depressed and hiding away, I could hear my flatmates moving and talking to each other, and I could walk to the shop or get a bus into town or go for a walk and see lots of people but never have to speak to them. But here, I don’t really go out, but I do see my family and have to talk to them, and I’m really not brilliant at conversation right now.
I just feel like crap, to be honest.
Recovering
Posted on: May 12, 2009
For the first time in a few days, I’m feeling kind of human. This is surely a step in the right direction.
I am, of course, prone to overreacting. I have not been at death’s door. I have had a cold. But in fairness to me, it was the kind of cold whose first victims are your sense of perspective and your ability to laugh at yourself. Two things which I am thankful have returned to me.
My friends have been their usual funny, caring, casual selves (Me: I feel better but I sound like an old man. My friend: Best of both worlds, then?). And I have been coughing and sneezing and croaking and complaining, which hasn’t been fun for any of us.
But, of course, feeling better, not needing to sneeze as much…it’s good, but it’s not a miracle. I can still feel like crap in another way.
I don’t think I’m depressed. I’m downhearted. I’m panicking. But that’s all. Read the rest of this entry »
Loopy, Lonely and Lost 
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