Loneliness

[montebello]

So I've been meaning to write something, but the willingness to carry through with it never really strikes me, so I'm just typing now in the hopes that it unlocks something.

I'm not happy, but what else is new? I haven't really been happy since I moved here and that was what, 19 years ago. Yeah, most of my adult life I've been unhappy. I think the overriding factor of that is loneliness, and it's just something I've come to accept. It's hard to make friends as an adult after college, and especially around here. I'm not going to make too many more friends through work both because I'm in a position of authority and we all work from home now, which I prefer though there is less social interaction. I don't fit in at churches so the fallback social group that people go for doesn't really work for me. Believe me, I tried it, at the pressing of my therapist back when I was in therapy. I tried meeting people through activities, and my number of acquaintances grew proportionally, but I never got good friends out of it, like people who you would see and talk to outside of those activities. I actually once interviewed a job for a place entirely because it had a bigger variety of people and in particular young people, a job where they regularly had social activities (I had friends that worked there so knew about it), in the hopes of making more friends and maybe, just maybe, getting a girlfriend through new friends or the job. But I didn't pass the interview, which in hindsight is probably good cause that company got bought and then went to shit allegedly, but still, it shows the lengths I was willing to go to try.

Relationships don't work out for me given my track record. Friends won't help set me up with women, I've tried online dating for years and finally quit it due to how much it was trashing my self esteem. What about chance encounters, you know, you're out at the grocery store and someone catches your eye? I thought about that a lot, and I'm just not going to do it anymore. I don't have a ton of evidence to build off of, but every time I've tried to ask out a stranger I've been rejected. That, combined with my lack of success in online dating, tells me that my looks aren't that great. Women have to get to know me to get to liking me, and with strangers, that just doesn't happen.

So I'm at this point where I'm sure I'm never going to have a relationship with a woman again, and I'm getting to be ok with that. It's not a life I would have picked for myself or would pick for anyone else, but that's the way it is and I needed to stop hoping for that which would never happen.

I don't really believe in fate or destiny or some version of it anymore. And there is no loving God like some religions like to advertise cause he or she wouldn't have made life this hard. So I'm not destined to meet anyone and much as I regret to admit it, there probably never was any rhyme or reason to the way things played out. I just didn't get a lot of opportunities in relationships and those I did, I or she didn't make right decisions, though I hold that I always did the best I could with the knowledge and feelings I had at the time.

I'm tired of hurting and being lonely, but I will go on. Suicide is too selfish of an act for me. I'm just so very, very tired of things the way they are, but all the paths I see as options to change things up end up looking like bad paths forward, screwing something good up, and remind me to try harder to appreciate the things that are going well.