My Struggle (edited)

This updated entry from my personal journal is very important to me:

"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 towards other people (or perhaps I'm just completely self-interested or narcissistic, 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 named "Cathy" 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 f*cking 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 completely self-interested and/or narcissistic), Cathy 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 Cathy) with many other women who I also felt I had fallen in love with, although she was the first. Cathy 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 hate mental illness for ruining my life, but I'll hate my life even more 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 bullsh*t 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 kill 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 describe me as "exhausting", "obsessed with myself", "like a cross between autistic and narcissistic", or 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, which may have given them the impression that I love them, 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. Whereas 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 get no likes despite having some views. 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 with my posts 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 sh*t on social media, but I do it anyway. One woman with a traumatic brain injury and mental health problems who I had s*x 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 f*cking 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 completely self-interested or narcissistic 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 (perhaps I don't care). 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 kill myself, and she was like "I can't handle this sh*t 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 really 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 dead. 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. Ever since I got approved for SSDI when I was 25 that's been my biggest worry."

- Mike

(My family calls me "Mike" but to people outside my family I am "John".)