I sort of just drift through people and places.
There’s loneliness, so there is motivation to connect, but there’s something in the way.
I don’t connect, so my interactions with others are transactional: I end up only using them when I need something.
For functional relationships like colleagues and lovers, that’s good enough: that’s what is expected.
Just kind and pleasant, but superficial interaction isn’t enough to form bonds. I find myself unable to really open up to others, and I’ve forgotten how.
Even so, it took me years just to get this far for it to no longer be so immediately obvious I am dysfunctional and violently rejected due to my aberrant behavior.
The mental hospitals taught me I must pretend to be normal. Weekly assessments that trained me to tell the psychiatrists what they wanted to hear.
Sure, there is no sense of safety, so through the lens of perpetual fight or flight everyone is a threat. There feeling that people want to use me.
Sure, there is fear of rejecion and abandonment. Reenactment.
Sure, there is a conviction people will reject me if I am myself. That I am too weird for them.
Ultimately, I don’t love myself. There is not a trace of self-love. Not a trace of a wish for the best for myself. So how can there be a wish for the best for others.
I got so used to the inevitability of suffering I stopped trying to make things better. The conviction that suffering is inevitable so why avoid it.
I rejected and hated you and your cruel selfishness.
I swore I would never be like you.
My extreme rejection of all that you are and your behavior while I was growing up, and my conviction to never be like you manifested into an extreme judgment: that selfishness was hateable. That all that is not utterly selfless is hateful selfishness.
This made it impossible to trust others, who, with self-identity and self-concept, had self-love and self-care. It made everyone look like an abuser like you: threats to be fought or placated with a fakeness. Fearing others, I was unable to connect to them. They became problems to fear and to solve.
It made me hate every trace of selfishness and self-care in myself: to aspire to impossible perfect selflessness – egolessness – to be no one. To have no self-love or self-care or self-respect. With violent self-hatred, I denied myself kindness, dignity, and the expression of desires and needs.
Today, I give permission to greyness. That noone is completely selfish or selfless. To look after myself.