In between bouts of lying in bed and dozing off, I’ve been thinking a lot about stuff.  Not much choice, since I don’t feel the interest in books or the computer or movies that would normally fill up my time.  I’ll try to put into words what’s been on my mind, but it’s difficult.  My thoughts go in one direction, then another.

I wrote to someone something to the effect of “why am I meant to feel only heartache and pain in life?”  It’s not just the usual self-pity that inspired that remark, it’s a question that actually sums up the problems I live with.  Whether I’m emotionally twisted up by the thought of trying to get a job, just a simple little job, or I’m feeling crushed under the weight of my perpetual loneliness, the real question is whether there is any place in this world, any life for me where I can feel something other than worthless and dead.  Of course, there’s no way to know.  All I know is that in my adult life I have not been happy, I have never felt like a part of this world, I’ve always felt alone and longed for things to be different.  How long does one have to live through these things before accepting what is plain for anyone else to see:  I am not going to be happy, nor even content in this life.  Obviously, there is a chance for things to change, the possibility that an opportunity will come my way.  In that case, whether or not I grab onto that opportunity or let it pass is up to me.  But after years of trying to take matters into my own hands, only to have my efforts come to nothing or the opportunities I create slip from my grasp, I think maybe it’s time to stop.

Hope is such a double-edged sword.  There are plenty of depressed, miserable people, who cling to some kind of hope that things will get better.  In my case, hope has become so vague as to be meaningless.  I can imagine that someday, my life will be changed in such a way as to allow me to escape the life I live now, which is a sort of prison.  But that’s only a kind of desperate hope, one that acknowledges that anything can happen in a life.  To believe that something could possibly happen between now and my death is not hope.

Unfortunately, during the rare times I’ve been able to hope for something genuine and possibly achievable—friendship, a job, a place for myself—it’s never gone right.  My hopes are constantly upset, the things I want in life and I think are within reach prove to be a mirage.  Life seems to offer something better with one hand, but when I approach it pushes me away with the other and snatches away the opportunity.  Such times are among the worst in my life, because when I think it’s possible for my life to change, then is when I hope the most, then is when I believe that I’m not condemned to misery forever.  When the hope is disappointed and I’m back where I started from, I go through hell all over again.  I allow myself to hope only to be disappointed, and every time that happens I lose a little piece of me.  It takes a lot for me to rise from my situation and reach for something better, and when I find there isn’t anything there, I find that it was all for nothing.

Day after day, year after year, I’ve accomplished nothing except prove to myself that nothing is worth the effort I put into it.  Most of my friendships have been temporary and superficial, and I have not known any friendship with someone who lives within 50 miles of me (or even 1000 miles, to be honest).  Just to have someone whose company I enjoy, with whom I can do those things that everyone else does with their friends, things which don’t matter but which give life so much of its color, is something I’ve never known.  I’ve been isolated for so long, I wouldn’t even know how such a friendship works, how two strangers decide (without having to talk about it out loud) that they could be friends… I’ve watched it happen time after time in many different situations, and it never fails to amaze me, because I simply don’t understand.

It goes without saying that I have no love life.  This more than anything else pains me constantly.  I don’t believe that any woman, at any time in my life, has had serious romantic feelings for me.  Perhaps here and there someone has had a bit of an infatuation with me, but I know of only one.  And that turned into a complete disaster for me.  I fear I will always be alone, and there is nothing I can do about it.  Over such a long time, it is this loneliness that has done me the most damage, because I’m losing the ability to believe I will have the one thing in life I’ve wanted more than any other.  If this is true, why should I go on?  To wallow in my loneliness?  To see couples everywhere I go?  To watch people fuck up their relationships, get divorced, and get another chance with someone else?  When do I get a chance?  Never.  I don’t get a chance.

For whatever reason, I’ve become a completely defective person.  I was not always thus, but a decade of failure and loneliness can do irreparable damage to the soul, and at the end of all that I’m left to take the censure and contempt of normal people to whom this world is as water to fish.  None can understand that there isn’t enough of me left to “just get a job” or “just go out and meet people” or whatever piece of shit advice they would offer. 

Yet after knowing all of this, after years of suffering and sorrow and failures, after coming to the conclusion that it’s more than likely that my life isn’t going to change for the better, ever… why can’t I just put an end to it?  What do I lack that so many others don’t, which has allowed them to remove themselves from their personal hell?  I’m so tired of it all, of all the heartache that my life is made of, I’m so tired of trying to get through the hard times, of trying to use the good times to try to change things.  So tired of finding reason to hope only to have my hopes dashed yet again, only to find myself as always staring at the ceiling at night knowing that there’s nothing to look forward to, ever.

I’m just too tired to do this anymore.  Is there any rest for me?