My social/interpersonal issues

I'm on disability (via a government program called SSDI) and I'm going to have this thing called a Continuing Disability Review where they assess if I'm still disabled and what's wrong with me. I was really worried about it, so I put together a really long essay/journal. This excerpt from it focuses on what's wrong with me socially/interpersonally:

"The fourth reason I can't work is social. I have issues with forming or sustaining human relationships and I have social issues. I have no friends (and have no desire for any, and I don't even experience loneliness except for occasionally missing the company of my mother). Like on 11/14/2022 I was in Washington DC on a trip and my uncle who lives there asked me if I was seeing any old friends in the area because from December 2016 to August 2018 I lived there for work, and the truth was that even though I had Facebook friends from my old work and from the board game club that I used to attend there, there was nobody who I was actually close with, who I actually kept in contact with, or who I was interested in seeing - I don't sustain interpersonal relationships (I don't know if I briefly form a real connection when I first meet someone but don't sustain or strengthen it over time or if there is never any real relationship from me to them in the first place other than the relationship one might have with a passing stranger who one just happened to say ask for directions from or something like that - I believe it's the latter). I can meet people and interact with them, but there is no real relationship there - they are nothing to me even if we have interacted repeatedly in the past. It's sort of like I'm able to interact with people but unable to truly have or sustain a real relationship with them - they're just someone who I happened to interact with in the past, an acquaintance. I cannot date (and I tried my best for over a decade - never even had one girlfriend). I tried everything I could to get a girlfriend - I put myself on between 4 and 6 dating apps for over 10 years, I went to club activities, bars, and nightclubs, I read self-help books, I consulted with multiple dating coaches, I went to hundreds of events, many of which were singles events, I even posted personal ads online and tried to seek out a long distance relationship, but still no girlfriend. Like you'd expect real relationship formation to happen naturally but for me it doesn't. My online interaction also has problems. On March 3rd to 5th 2022 I tried messaging a young woman online multiple times but I had to unsend the message each time because it was making me crazy and ultimately I gave up trying to message her and had to block her to preserve my sanity. I previously had to give up contact with a young woman because I had a panic attack every time I replied to her, and yes I've tried meds for that and nothing can prevent it. I recall a time when I canceled a date because I had constant and recurring panic attacks that wouldn't stop until I canceled the date and then never talked to her again. I can't control the panic response, it's like an automatic, involuntary, almost allergic type reaction I sometimes have to relationship formation where the only solution is to end the interpersonal relationship (I call this panic response my "relationship destruction reflex"). This is a recurring thing for me. I anticipate never having a girlfriend or wife even though I have always wanted one (or at least thought that I wanted one, or at the very least liked the idea of having one). Like if there were a button I could push to have a girlfriend or wife I would totally push that button - I don't even care much about her race, her weight, if she has mental illness, how poor she is, if she's below average looking, etc - I have always had a desire for a girlfriend or wife but have never been able to make it happen. Social relationships are important for many jobs and leadership positions but for me that aspect of life is severely hindered. Even getting a job requires going through a job interview, which requires leaving a good impression on a hiring person, which is a social barrier. Also, one time I tried emailing a human relations person and had panic attacks after every email I sent, which made work related functioning difficult. When I'm not having panic attacks after messaging someone, I tend to lose interest and not reply anymore - I can be sort of "asocial" or "not social" in that regardless of how I'm doing, I never want to smile at anyone and tell them that I'm doing well. I don't care to hear about their Christmas or whatever. I'm not interested in whether or not they slept well last night. When me and my mom spent time with my cousin and her husband, I noticed that her husband was asking me a bunch of questions but I wasn't asking him any questions, and that was normal or natural for me. Like I might text someone new or someone who liked me on a dating app "Hey, how are you?" and then they might reply "Good, how about you?" but the conversation ends there - I just stare at their message and never reply and am not interested in replying. Sometimes instead of not replying I overshare (ex. by writing "I feel depressed and have issues when I try to walk"), causing them to distance themselves from me (I tend to do this with women more whereas with men I'll usually just stop communicating, although sometimes I will overshare and then later stop communicating if they haven't blocked me, like by writing someone a massive letter about myself where I over-share, which is what I'm doing now by writing this essay). Like sometimes I will send a woman on a dating app a reply containing a massive essay containing way too much information about myself, causing her to unmatch me or block me, which is basically the same end result as if I never replied to her - no more interpersonal relationship (I think maybe this almost automatic oversharing that I do is part of my relationship destruction reflex or is an involuntary, subconscious effort to get them to go away because it results in the destruction of relationships or at least helps avoid their formation, which perhaps is what I subconsciously or involuntarily want). With men, I've had people who could have been good friends tell me "text me any time" and I just never text them or communicate with them in any way ever again - I guess I'm not interested. My childhood next door neighbor who I used to play videogames with as a kid gave me his new number at his little brother's wedding that my parents and I attended and said "don't be a stranger - talk to me some time" and I never talked to him other than texting him my name when we traded numbers - I guess I became a stranger to him despite him telling me not to be a stranger (I am Facebook friends with his little brother but I don't interact with his little brother either). A woman once messaged me "What are you doing today?" and I saw her message but never replied, I guess I didn't want to talk to her (which is pretty typical of me, at least after the initial meeting where I may ask a new person what they do for a living, their hobbies, stuff like that, but I lose that interest after I sort of know who they are). In early 2023 a guy who knew me before and was listed as a friend on my Facebook and Instagram saw me in real life and tried to interact with me in public and I didn't ask him how he or his mom were (he was with him mom), I just sort of waved and shook hands with them both and was like "I have something that I'm going to do" (even though I had nothing but free time) - I didn't want to talk to them and I wasn't interested in how they were doing or their day or anything. I have a lack of real relationship formation or sustainment. Maybe at some point some of these people thought we were friends but really, at least to me, we were just temporary acquaintances (I am not really anyone's friend). I don't hate anybody and I'm not intentionally mean to anyone, that's just how I am. Sometimes I form one-way parasocial relationships, where I get obsessed with a near stranger or minor celebrity (this has caused me to cyber stalk in the past, Googling their names and combing through all their social media and contacting them repeatedly despite them not being interested. Sometimes I will feel and believe that I am in love with them, and think about them all the time, but after they ignore and block me for long enough it dissipates and I realize that there was never actually anything there relationship wise), but real, lasting, close, two-way relationships with personal emotional caring or emotional response are an issue for me. Therapy can't help me because I don't want to tell anyone, including a therapist, how I'm doing and if I forced myself to see a therapist, after spewing my backstory in my typical over-sharing manner, I would be like "I have nothing to say to you anymore - can I please not see you?" Some people form relationships with their therapist, but I can't even form a relationship with a therapist despite the fact that they are paid to get me to form a relationship with them. One time a therapist refused to see me because he could tell that I didn't want to see him, even though I wasn't aware that I was giving off that impression. I mention this later on in this essay but I've seen four or five therapists before (who didn't refuse to see me) including one in group sessions and I never felt that I benefited from therapy - in fact in the past I did outpatient behavioral health at Larkin Hospital and the longer I did it the worse my depression got, and then it gradually got better after I didn't do it anymore. In practice I don't think the outpatient behavioral health caused my depression to get worse, I think it naturally just so happens to get worse and better on its own and the timing just so happened to coincide with when I went to outpatient behavioral health, but I also don't think outpatient behavioral health made it any better either (this is the case with a lot of treatments I have tried). I don’t want to talk to a therapist, even if it were free. Socially, even with my current psychiatric doctor Advanced Practice Registered Nurse (APRN) Matamoros, I've gotten to the point where I don't want to have a two-way conversation with him - I would rather give him an update about what is going on with me by leaving him a typed letter, sort of like this essay. Real relationships are two-way, where there is closeness between both of you and a real relationship exists, whereas leaving someone a typed letter is one-way, where the person who wrote the letter (me) is oversharing information about myself with you, but there is no information exchange or closeness in the other direction (and there is not necessarily a real relationship in existence between the person leaving the letter and the person reading it), and often after I've left or handed the other person the letter I don't want to see them or communicate with them again, or at the very least I have nothing to say to them anymore. I honestly don't want to see a doctor anymore, but I've heard of people on SSDI who don't see their doctor being asked to see Social Security's doctor during a Continuing Disability Review, and I've heard of Social Security's doctor writing unfavorable, copy-paste reports from templates after a very brief visit that sometimes say things like "can button shirt" even when the patient's shirt didn't have any buttons, so I'm kind of forcing myself to see my doctor to avoid ending up in that situation. If I didn’t worry about a Continuing Disability Review, I wouldn’t see a psychiatrist or APRN anymore - I do not believe they help me.

Before I go on to the fifth reason I'm not working, I'm going to go on a little tangent where I clarify a misconception about how I am socially. In the previous paragraph, I wrote "I can be sort of 'asocial' or 'not social'". This is not the same thing as being "antisocial". The word "antisocial" is used in the phrase "antisocial personality disorder" (ASPD), which is the phrase that psychologists use instead of "sociopath" or "psychopath". I am not a sociopath or a psychopath. I saw a person with ASPD and self-described sociopath talk about how she would do bad things, like in childhood push another kid down the stairs or in adulthood break apart another person's relationship with no regard for other people, just because it excites her, thus bringing her joy. I never do that kind of stuff. I do not enjoy hurting people. This person with ASPD was female so a lot of the bad stuff she did was more sneaky and less openly violent than the stuff a male person with ASPD would do, but I'm not violent - if anything I do everything I can to avoid a fight. This person with ASPD talked about how it ran in her family and how she had a very charming male family member who brought about the death of another family member to collect an inheritance. I would never do that. That being said, as an asocial person, I'm not really close to my family (except for my mother). Like I remember visiting my grandpa while he was dying and just knowing that this was the last time I would see him and not caring - I didn't feel sad or cry or anything. I didn't have a desire for him to die, but it also doesn't bother me in any way that he died. I mean I guess death is sad, but so is the death of a cute animal. It's just an inevitable part of reality. On Dec 13, 2022 a thought reminded me of my grandpa for the first time in a long time and then I was like "oh yeah, he's dead" and I didn't feel any emotional response one way or the other - no response at all. Recently my parents went to visit his grave and I didn't care enough to go - he's just not that special to me (also I was getting tired due to going to bed while the sun was out due to my non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder). Next I'll talk about my relationship with my dad. I live with my parents now, so I'm forced to interact with him, but when one of us is out or on a trip I don't miss him at all or feel like my life is any worse without him in it. In November 2022 I went on a week-long trip to Washington DC with just my mom and I didn't call my dad - I just wasn't interested. When I didn't live with my parents, like when I was in college or working, I never called my dad. I don't hate him or anything, I just never experienced a desire to call him and it never crossed my mind when I was living on my own. Finally I'll talk about someone who used to be a friend to me for years (I say she used to be a friend to me but I don't believe I was an emotionally caring or true friend to her). She was on the same dating app as me and was looking for a guy who would be her boyfriend despite her being asexual (a person who experiences no sexual interest or attraction). We matched (I like every female profile because it's faster and gets me more matches). I never texted her first (except for rare little things like to write her "Happy Hanukkah" if something reminded me to), but she texted me every few days for years, beginning before the pandemic. Sometimes I would see her text "hey" and respond if I was in the mood to chat, and at other times I would ignore her and a few days later she would try again. Eventually because I hurt her self-esteem (I wasn't trying to be mean, I just shared my honest belief about her cognitive abilities) she stopped communicating with me (this happened on 11/8/2022), so at that moment she broke up with me interpersonal relationship wise (I wouldn't say I broke up with her because I never had a relationship with her beyond the relationship one might have with a random acquaintance) and that was the end of us knowing each other or ever communicating again (other than me texting her "Happy Hanukkah" the next month because something reminded me of her, but she blocked me on Facebook and deleted my number). There was virtually nothing holding us together (I guess she sort of broke up with me interpersonal relationship wise but I genuinely don't care or mind at all). You'd think I'd feel some sense of loss at having lost the only person other than my mother who communicated with me frequently and regularly for years, but I felt no sense of loss. Never even missed her. You'd think I would be sad that someone who talked to me for years permanently stopped talking to me, but I didn't feel anything, again because there was never a real relationship from me to her. I don't feel a desire to communicate with her. Despite all this, maybe a year or six months before our platonic breakup happened, she started telling me about this guy who she was hanging out with one-on-one (I thought to myself at the time "how come she was hanging out with this guy one-on-one and not even asking me to hang out with her?"), a guy who eventually became her boyfriend, and while hearing about this I felt a little bit jealous - why did she end up in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship and not me? Well I don't think it is possible for me to end up in one given how I am with people; I don't form or sustain real relationships. Or perhaps I don't feel any emotional response associated with people - like sometimes I will look at someone who I met and ate a meal with or went on a date with or even slept with just once or twice (because it never works out long term) the same way as if I'm looking at wallpaper - no emotional response whatsoever. That being said, people with ASPD (antisocial personality disorder) aren't necessarily asocial (I don't know if "asocial" is the right word to use) the way I am. Like the person with ASPD who I mentioned earlier said on TikTok that she has a tier of friends who she cares more about than other people and who bring value to her life and a higher tier of friends who she is fiercely loyal to and would do anything for (she said she would help them bury a body and give them an alibi). I basically have one tier and it's "acquaintance" or "person who I used to interact with because we both wanted to play a game of pool or a board game or something". Like (excluding my relationship with my mother) there's nothing special to me about any interpersonal relationship that I've had since my early teens with maybe one or two exceptions (well I have had sex but it was a short term thing brought about by her promiscuity due to a brain injury or bipolar disorder, but we don't have a relationship. Also once when I was 22 I had a sort of platonic partnership because my relationship destruction reflex was in remission for a few months, but then it came back and I destroyed that relationship with my anxiety and panic which made me really clingy, ultimately causing her to dump and block me. The platonic partnership was actually a really unusual period in my life because my panic attack response, or "relationship destruction reflex" as I called it, wasn't just in remission - I actually had the opposite response which actually felt good and made me look forward to talking to her in the future, but as I said before eventually the chemical response I get from interacting with her or sending her communications changed and the relationship became impossible to sustain. I guess I haven't had any close interpersonal relationships with other males since my early teens and the couple that I've had with women were flukes that didn't last). Sometimes I stalk or cyber-stalk people, especially women, who I think I feel a strong attachment to (maybe I think I want them to love me or that I want to be their boyfriend), but again there's no real, close, lasting, bidirectional relationship with emotional caring there (although sometimes in a stalker-stalkee relationship, the stalker will think they have a real relationship with the stalkee, but the stalkee, or person being stalked, will not believe this, and typically the stalkee is right). Anyway, I remember one time when my mood was up I thought that if I were the only person on Earth and there were robots to keep everything including all the restaurants and websites and stuff working, I wouldn't be any less happy than I currently am. Like I mean sometimes I feel like playing a game of pool, and I might play a game against myself, but I would also be down to play against a real person, but playing a game of pool with a person doesn't bring me closer to them. If anything, playing a game of pool regularly with the same person for long enough results in us gradually playing together less and less often over time, eventually not playing together anymore (this happened with a neighbor I used to know). Everyone is just sort of an acquaintance or stranger to me, and the relationships fade or the interpersonal distance between us increases with time (or perhaps there was never a real relationship there to begin with and this fact just sort of materializes into apparent reality with time despite the fact that when we first met I said something like "Hi, I'm John, what's your name?" then shook their hand after hearing them utter their name that I will probably forget). It's kind of hard for me to explain what I mean by "asocial" because there's no such thing as "asocial personality disorder" and it doesn't mean that I have anything against people or want them to hurt themselves or anything like that (some people I actually have a positive opinion of), it's just sort of how I am. I don't think it's obvious to other people, and even to myself, that I am asocial because I still go through the basic social gestures like making eye contact, introducing myself, and shaking hands, but these behaviors are just sort of an automatic initial thing and almost every time I forget their name (sometimes I get around this by sending myself a text with their name and description immediately after the introduction, but sometimes in a group even this isn't enough). Identifying as asocial (or someone who doesn't form and sustain real relationships with other people) also doesn't mean that I'm introverted, that I'm particularly shy, that I have autism, that I never enjoy activities that involve other people, or that I don't know or perform basic social gestures like shaking hands and asking you what you do for a living. There are some disadvantages with being asocial like being unable to lead despite wanting to (I once ran for President of the United States in a manic state for maybe 6 months and the only person who donated to my campaign was my mother despite me spending thousands on political ads on social media) and being unable to get a girlfriend or long term female sexual partner despite wanting one, but that's just my reality. This is an aside, but as a non-famous, not particularly good looking, not particularly charismatic straight man with no real relationships (except for the familial relationship with my mother), it is also a pretty rare event for me to get sex. Straight women usually want to get physical with their husband, fiancé, boyfriend, or at the very least a friend with benefits who they feel a real connection with, not some random distant acquaintance or stranger like myself. One time after having sex with a woman in the missionary position she told me (I don't remember her exact words) that it was like there was "nothing there", like as if I were looking "through her rather than at her" - "no connection" (I don't think she used all these exact words but that was the idea). That's not what women want. Women want a man who remains genuinely interested in them and their life and who cares about them, who wants to hear about their Christmas and know if they slept well last night and is interested in texts from them that say what they're doing today, and none of those things are true for me, at least beyond the initial meeting(s) or introduction(s). I regularly go years (sometimes about half a decade) at a time with zero sex of any sort despite being open to almost anyone with a vagina under 45 who I'm not afraid might try to kill me for not committing to her (just speaking loosely based on personal experience). I am almost always open to it when a woman expresses sexual interest, it's just a very rare thing for me as a guy with no real non-familial relationships for a woman to do that, and when a woman does randomly express sexual interest in me there is usually something wrong with her like some form of mental illness, homelessness, or brain injury (and yes, I have engaged with such women before, I've even made out with one homeless woman and was rejected by another who I took out to dinner after I saw her begging outside a restaurant, so my standards are extremely low). More often than a real woman expressing sexual interest in me, a catfish or scammer on a website like Instagram or TikTok does so by impersonating a woman and then trying to get me to invest in her crypto scam or pay for her nude cam website or something like that. It's a very rare, very random thing for a real woman to express any sort of sexual interest in me, either online or in person. Most young-ish straight men who don't get sex with women often don't actually know exactly why this is the case and tend to start by assuming superficial things like that women want a taller man with more money, but women aren't as superficial as men and, if they're in the mood, will have sex with a guy who isn't particularly tall or rich if he is her boyfriend who has a real, close, caring, two-way relationship with her or she's fallen in love with him, like with attachment. Also, before my muscle rigidity caused my back to hunch over, I was 5'11" and making $86 an hour on W2 and got zero sex or girlfriends for years, so I don't think height or money was my problem. I once saw a hot woman married to a small, deformed, crippled man (who I admit had a good sense of humor) in an electric mobility scooter who presumably was like that before they met and I've watched a women hold hands with her partner who is significantly shorter than her, so I know women aren't that superficial. I am worse at attracting women than a small, deformed, crippled man in an electric mobility scooter because of permanent differences between my personality and his which I never consciously chose. I have never been anyone's boyfriend, fiancé, or husband, I don't have real, close, two-way relationships, and in almost every case where a woman has fallen in love with me, she has been severely mentally ill as usually only mentally ill or crazy people fall in love with random people who have no real relationship with them (sometimes people think they've fallen in love with a celebrity but that's not real love and there is no real relationship there). Anyway, I have met lots of very nice, good people, and maybe if I actually wanted to hear about their Christmas or genuinely and in a healthy, non-obsessive, non-stalker-ish way wanted to hear about their day or something like that we could be real friends in a bidirectional way, but to be honest I'm not interested and I can't even fake it so real relationship formation will never happen. If I really forced myself to have a connection with someone, it might trigger my "relationship destruction reflex" that I talked about in the previous paragraph, causing me to have panic attacks or feel that I can't breathe until I destroy the relationship.

It is 11/19/2022 and I thought of some additional stuff related to being someone who doesn't have real relationships (I used the word "asocial" but different people mean different things when they use that word). Some people may have different notions of what a "real" relationship is. I previously mentioned the stalker-stalkee relationship. A stalker-stalkee relationship is not a real relationship the way say a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is a real relationship. The person being stalked has, while they are ignoring, avoiding, blocking, or trying to get away from their stalker, no real relationship with their stalker despite what their stalker might believe. Maybe one or even both of them believed they had something in the past, but at the time the stalking is happening there is no real relationship there other than what the stalker believes exists, what the stalker imagines in their head. Some people (especially stalkers) believe that they can obtain a real relationship with their stalkee, the sort of relationship they imagine exists in their head, by obtaining more information about their stalkee, but having information about someone doesn't necessarily mean you have a real relationship with them, even if you believe otherwise. For example, a stalker may Google someone's full name and find their email or online username and then Google those things to find their social media, past blog posts or podcasts, and binge through all of these sources of information about their stalkee to try and develop or feel a connection with them (something that I have done multiple times in the past), but doing these things does not cause a real relationship to exist, and the connection is uni-directional (from the stalker to the stalkee, but not the other way around). Real relationships are bidirectional and a stalker-stalkee relationship is not bidirectional. Conceptually it's very similar to the relationship a random US citizen might have with a US President who they have strong emotional feelings about, or a fan might have with a celebrity. They like the celebrity and consume all their social media, but there is no real, close, bidirectional relationship with genuine emotional caring there - the relationship only exists in their head, just like the stalker's relationship with their stalkee, and is more of an obsession or parasocial relationship than a real relationship. I have been the stalker before and I have even had someone who was very attached to me in their mind who I couldn't get rid of (I would say they meet the definition of a stalker but they're a mostly harmless mentally ill woman). In my experience the best thing to do about such people is to ignore, avoid, and block them, and try and make it so they can't find you, get to you, or interact with you. Engaging with them or interacting with them can just cause them to stalk you more, and doing things like sleeping with them can just increase their belief in the existence of a relationship between you two, and when it doesn't work out like they imagined it in their head they can become vengeful and might do something crazy like find your address on WhitePages.com, go to your house, and try to light it on fire or something like that. Stalkers may truly believe they love their stalkee, that they care about them and that there is a real relationship there, but it is a delusion because someone who really loves you, cares about you with genuine feeling, and supports you would not do something like trying to burn down your house while you're sleeping in it (I'm just using this as a hypothetical example, but you get the idea). There's a certain danger in someone else believing they currently have a close relationship with you when that relationship does not actually presently exist. I used to believe I had relationships with people, especially certain women who I liked and wanted to have sex with. Time and time again, reality proved to me that the relationship I believed existed and might exist in the future did not actually exist and would not exist in the future. And I'm done with it. I'm done with trying to get a girlfriend. I used to search for board game events listed on websites like meetup.com and eventbrite.com to meet women who occasionally enjoy playing board games like I do in hopes of developing a relationship with one of them, but I don't do that anymore because it's futile - it's not like I'll ever talk to or hang out with anyone who I play board games with at one of these events outside of the event or form a real lasting friendship or relationship with anyone. Heck, I'm done with even trying to learn and remember other people's names. I don't actually (and will not in the future) have a real relationship with you, why should I bother asking for and remembering your name (as if I even could remember it without checking my phone)? When I go to a board game event and meet people I've never met before, I smile and shake their hands, but I'm not actually happy to see them; that smile is fake, it's just politeness. I have no interest in those people and they don't matter to me and never will matter to me. It's fake (as in the relationship is fake - I'm not really close to anyone, except maybe my mother, relationship wise, and while I may develop obsessions with people, I don't truly and genuinely, in a healthy pro-social manner, want to hear about their Christmas or their day or whatever). Or perhaps a better word than "fake" is simply that in reality there is "nothing there" with another person, and there never will actually be anything there. Like once a woman who I thought I fell in love with and who agreed to go on a walk with me told me after the walk that there was "nothing there" with me other than what I at the time imagined in my head, and I think that description of "nothing there" kind of applies to my relationships with everyone. All of my relationships are temporary (except maybe love that I experience for members of my biological family). I do not have the ability to have real, close, bidirectional relationships with other people. I have the ability to stalk people (especially women), but a stalker-stalkee relationship is not a real relationship, and it's not good for anyone. I learned the hard way that I cannot stalk my way into being a woman's boyfriend, fiancé, or husband - it will never happen and I'm done with that. I'm done with trying to be someone I'm not. I am asocial (or perhaps I'm just totally self-absorbed, I'll talk about that more in the next paragraph), and I have been that way for a long time, for as long as I've had discernible mental illness. That's just how I am. If I had the power to become a "normal" person, with real two-way friendships and intimate partnerships, I would have made that choice in a heartbeat, but I can’t, and no psychiatric drug can fix me (and I have tried over 10 different ones including Lithium, Lamictal, Depakote, Carbamazepine, Topiramate, Saphris, Risperidone, Invega, Haldol, Latuda, and more). The initial and true reason I went on psychiatric drugs was not for primary symptoms of mental illness like mania or depression (even though when I went to my first psychiatrist I said that was the reason). The true reason was to try and change my personality and get a girlfriend, and it never worked. Before I developed mental illness (not including the childhood ADHD), when I was about 12 or 13 years old, there was this girl I used to eat lunch with each day in an outdoor area behind the school, just the two of us, but then I developed my initial mental illness and changed and things didn't work out with us (in high school I wanted to go with her to the senior prom, but before the prom, when I asked her to join me on my regular walk on the beach, she said that she was "not interested, never interested", which I still vaguely remember over 10 years later because it fucking hurt. I ultimately ended up going to the prom alone after multiple other rejections). After I graduated from that school (I went there for both middle and high school), I wanted to use psychiatric medication to fix me to make things work out interpersonal relationship wise in the future, but it never worked. Years after things stopped working with her (perhaps the reason things stopped working with her was because I became distant and/or self-absorbed), that girl blocked me for stalking/harassment. Even more years later, in 2019 (according to the Facebook messenger logs), from another Facebook account I used to go around her first Facebook block, I apologized to her and reminded her of us with a photo of the two pages she filled in my middle school yearbook where she wrote in a friendly manner about how we first met, but then she blocked that second Facebook account of mine as well. From high school on I had similar experiences (as my experience with that girl) with many other women who I also felt I had fallen in love with, although she was the first. That girl has since gotten married (from my second Facebook account I saw a profile photo of hers where a man was proposing to her), but my experience with her was one of the most emotionally painful and formative experiences of my life (I still to this day have a small teddy bear holding a heart that says "Love" on it which she gave me on Valentine's Day when I was maybe 13 years old) and what happened set my future objectives in life. I wanted to correct what happened, but maybe with another woman. I had dreams of marriage and I wanted one day to have children with a woman who I had fallen in love with (it's not unusual for me to fantasize about a future with a child with a woman who I had fallen in love with), but I don't see either marriage or children ever happening for me. I despise my mental illness for ruining my life, but I'll be even more miserable if I get kicked off SSDI. As an atheist who believes in biology (I never chose to be an atheist, I'm just kind of hardwired to not be religious in the same way some men are hardwired to be gay), I see life pair off and reproduce itself, and I believe that's the purpose of life, or at least of my life, but I don't believe I'll ever be able to achieve my purpose as a lifeform. I've heard LGBTQI+ people like Lady Gaga say things like "God makes no mistakes… I was born this way", but I think that's a load of overly nice bull people say to spread positive feelings and make people feel good. When a horse has a baby with a visible birth defect, it is not uncommon for her to end the life of her baby after it's born (in some other species the mother eats the unhealthy or deformed cubs). Like the horse born with a birth defect, I am defective, a mistake, and I believe I as a human being at least deserve the right to put myself to sleep forever in the manner of my choosing, in accordance with my personal beliefs.

It is 3/19/2023 and I thought of one more social/interpersonal thing that is wrong with me. I've heard it said that if you just be yourself, people will gravitate to you. When I just be myself, people actually seem to want to get away from me, or at the very least don't like the interaction (the most success I've ever had while online dating was actually by pretending and faking interest, but that put me in an immense amount of distress by setting off my "relationship destruction reflex" that I talked about before). I think this phenomenon of people not liking me being myself is most evident in my social media, especially my Facebook. In "normal" people's social media, they seem to want to appear friendly, welcoming, and happy. It seems that they want to invite the viewer in. My social media seems to be the opposite of that. Where a normal person's social media might say something like "had a wonderful time with my beloved <INSERT_PERSON>" and get lots of likes, my social media might say something like "I hate my life and wish for euthanasia (where a doctor puts me to sleep forever)" and not get any likes. Like I look at my social media and it's horrible (it's not uncommon for people who see it to unfollow me on Facebook or unfriend me). Or my social media will share way too much information about myself in a one-sided manner such that nobody cares to read it (except for maybe my mother). To give you an idea of the kind of stuff I post on social media, I have in the past taken quotes out of this essay/journal and posted it on social media. I get very little interaction on social media. One person who I used to play pool with told me that when he sees a Facebook posts of mine, he reads it and silently judges me without interacting with it (as do other people), and he said that I should keep the stuff I post on social media in my head. Another guy who I sometimes used to eat lunch with in high school told me over Facebook messenger that I "overshare my distress" on social media. My mother told me that I provide way too much information about myself on social media and that other people don't care. She said that I shouldn't just dump my personal shit on social media, but I do it anyway. One woman with a traumatic brain injury and mental health problems who I had sex with a few times in college (I kind of became obsessed with her and wanted to become her boyfriend but she told me I would "make a horrible boyfriend", which seriously hurt) but who later cut off all or almost all contact with me (she sent one or maybe two short email replies after blocking me on social media and blocking my phone), before cutting off contact with me, told me in an email that she could not call me a friend (despite me believing that she was my closest and most enduring female friend) and that it seems that I do not know what other people are going through, and based on my self-centered or self-absorbed ranting on Facebook, I don't care. I don't know, but I guess that makes sense given that I never ask people I know (or used to know) how they're doing. She used to be the only person other than my mother who regularly liked my posts on Facebook, but I never looked at her Facebook posts unless I developed an obsession with her and was sort of cyber-stalking her (which was when I would go on her Facebook wall and go through all her old photos and past posts at once). One time I matched with a woman on a dating app and she asked me "how are you?" and I replied that I wanted to end my life, and she was like "I can't handle this intense stuff from a stranger" and unmatched me. I don't know. I really didn't mind at all that she unmatched me. I don't really know why I am the way I am. I don't feel that I need any friends. I guess I write about what is significant to me and what I care about, and really all that is is me and my personal struggles in life. Like I generally agree with the Democrats on most issues, but I don't care about the world being destroyed by global warming because only 4°F of warming is predicted by year 2100 and by the time year 2100 rolls around I'll be gone, with no children left behind. Like at this point in life my greatest desire and greatest source of happiness is food that I want to eat. Like I might feel like "I want a chicken sandwich" or maybe a chicken burrito or something but there is no cooked chicken in the fridge, so I struggle despite my muscle rigidity to get to the nearest restaurant to my house to buy food (sometimes I can't walk but I can scooter so I use that), and if I manage to make it and eat the food I feel happy, and really at this point in my life that is my #1 source of happiness and my biggest concern. I am concerned that if my disability benefits get cut I won't be able to get food. My mother already told me that if my disability benefits get cut she won't give me any money and I have to pay her rent to sleep in the bedroom I grew up in (I get a good deal on rent relative to what a stranger would charge), so I would really be in a predicament if I get kicked off benefits."