So I finished reading through most of the e-mail I sent to N when we broke up. It’s kind of funny to be reading just half the conversation and yet still getting the full emotional impact without knowing what the response was.

It’s also kind of weird to be reading your own writing from a truly detached perspective. I am certainly not the same person who wrote those sad, heart-wrenching, gut-churning missives. I may still be currently clinically depressed, but I’ve also got a decades worth of baggage on top of it all.

I am clearly going to be alone for the rest of my life. Ah well.

What is sad and pathetic is that in my chronological writing—from e-mails to the handwritten notes I kept to my blog in its multiple incarnations, I just keep coming back to the topic of how hopelessly alone I feel, how wretched this singular existence is, and how helpless I feel about being able to do anything about it.

What I have recently accepted is that I just don’t want to deal with it. In some ways, it’s a manifestation of executive dysfunction syndrome. I know precisely what I have to do, and yet I’m not doing it. It’s not just this, not just meeting people. It’s a lot of things. I realize that the way I have learned to cope with stress is to freeze up when there’s too much pressure on me. To just fall apart.

It’s amazing that I’ve gone through all of these disasters, many at least partially caused by my own hand, still to have made some plodding progress in life. Looking back, I sort of wonder how I managed to escape psychotherapy. You’d think that someone as depressed or at least as dysthymic as I am would’ve been noticed. It’s easy to wallow in self-pity and say that it’s just that no one cares, but maybe if I hadn’t been so highly functioning, they would’ve picked me up.

Sometimes I wonder if being put under general anesthesia as a little kid didn’t nuke parts of my brain.

Whatever. It’s the hand I’m dealt, I guess.