It’s Really Not That Deep

Some days I hate myself for still wanting things I was never built to have. Some days I hate everyone else for having them without trying. I hate their friends. I hate their laughter. I hate birthday parties and inside jokes and photos where nobody is standing slightly outside the circle. I hate how effortless it looks. Like if you asked them how they do it, they’d laugh. Or look at you in that quiet way that makes you wish you hadn’t asked. I know it’s pathetic to resent people for being loved. I know it makes me seem like someone you wouldn’t want to know. I hate that I know that and I still feel it anyway.

It’s weird - sometimes I look at those lives and feel envious, and sometimes I feel relieved they aren’t mine. Come to think about it, I don’t actually want a life full of constant company or endless togetherness or the expectation of consistency. I just want to know I’m not incompatible with it. I want to know being around me isn’t something people have to budget their energy for. I want to know I’m not an acquired taste someone decides they don’t have.

I seem to come with less margin for error than other people do. There’s less tolerance for confusion, or intensity, or even being misunderstood. I don’t think people are necessarily trying to be unkind most of the time, but kindness never seems to reach me in the same automatic way it reaches other people.

If I look back, there really isn’t a version of my life where this played out differently. It’s always been some variation of the same equation: either I am too strange to include or too fragile to keep. Sometimes it looked like obvious bullying, and other times it looked like being left out. Sometimes it even looked like the ones I loved the most letting me keep loving them long after they’d decided they were done with me. I’m not too sure what’s worse.

I don’t have many memories of being chosen. Just a few - enough to complicate the story I tell myself about being fundamentally incompatible with closeness. Mostly I remember moments that carried more feeling than I could name at the time, that rearranged something in me without asking. I didn’t know then whether I was allowed to call it love, or whether love was supposed to look clearer than that. I just know that years later, I recognise the shape it left - and I still notice it when I’m trying to understand what closeness is supposed to feel like.

I wish I could say that getting diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder later on rearranged my life into something more manageable. It didn’t. It felt like confirmation that this wasn’t just a phase, or bad luck, or something I could fix by trying harder to seem normal. It wasn’t adolescence. It wasn’t the wrong crowd. It was structural.

When you’re a kid, difficulty comes with an implied grace period. You’re awkward because you’re growing. You’re intense because you’re hormonal. You’re isolated because you just haven’t found your people yet. Everyone assumes time is on your side.

Being told I was sick meant understanding time was never neutral.

The traits I thought would dilute with age had already been present for as long as I could remember. And the older I got, the less they resembled phases and the more they resembled trajectory.

I used to think I was becoming more self-aware. Now I sometimes wonder if I was just becoming more entrenched. There’s something especially cruel about realising the thing you were waiting to outgrow will be the thing you have to spend the rest of your life containing.

People talk about diagnoses like they’re keys - like once you have one, things finally start making sense and doors start opening. Mine felt more like a note slipped under the door explaining why it had always been locked. Not just locked either, but never meant to open for me in the first place.

Hey - I mean, it’s useful information. At least you know the door isn’t stuck because you’re pushing it wrong. At least you know it wasn’t built to open in the first place.

What it doesn’t do is make standing outside it any less embarrassing. And as it turns out - knowing it won’t open doesn’t actually cure the reflex. You still reach for the handle. The only difference is now you know better.

I suppose that’s the real question - whether it’s worse to look ridiculous, or to stop pretending you don’t care.

No conclusion so far.