I don’t know if it’s just the psychotropic drugs, but I feel like I’m evading something lurking in my brain. Something that I’ve tried to face down head-to-head, only to find myself defeated each and every time. So like the coward that I am, I’ve decided to try to just runaway from it and ignore it.

I used to think that it’s just about being lonely, but for some reason that just doesn’t sound epic enough for this bleakness I’ve been struggling with for the greater part of the last decade.

Maybe it’s just my penchant for melodrama. But I just had this random sense of utter alienation as I drove back from the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. I’ve used this word before: I feel like an exile. Exiled from what, you may ask? Sometimes I think that I’m exiled from humanity. I haven’t made a strong, solid connection with another human being in a long time. You know those connections that you know you can always rely on, come hell or high water?

The worst thing is that I’ve let those connections that I do have wither away. (Yes, I know, I know, I’m a sucky friend.)

I’ve never read a whit of Lacan’s philosophy, but I feel like I’ve intuited some of it, at least. We’re all searching for this stable center that doesn’t really exist. (We’re all crawling along the spokes of a wheel, only to find that the center is a void.) Like, I stopped to think about one of the things that I’ve probably been subconsciously hoping for all my life: the stability of a family. Now, I really shouldn’t complain. As far as the average American family goes, mine is actually pretty solid. But when you’re a kid, you need a lot more insulation from the vicissitudes of the world. In some ways, looking back, I feel like I lost my innocence too soon. I know reality is, frankly, disgustingly ugly, but kids should be able to live their childhoods. Maybe that’s why I picked the job I’m in.

If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye — Holden Caulfield’s rendition of a poem by Robert Burns in Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Looking through the lens of hindsight is dangerous and misleading, but the feelings I remember resonate with these rationalizations I’m making up as I type: for the longest time, my dad wasn’t really completely committed to this whole family thing. One, he was physically gone for a few years because he had to be halfway across the country for career reasons. Two, he often punctuated heated, irrational arguments with my mom with the threat of divorce, or sometimes suicide (his own brother had commited suicide some time ago, a fact that probably doesn’t bode well for me), and he didn’t really make any attempt to hide this from anyone. Three, my dad is not exactly the most faithful guy in the world. As far as Filipino guys go, he’s nowhere near the worst, but, there it is.

So I feel like I had this sense of instability instilled in me at a much too young age. Sure, my parents ended up staying together, miraculously, but I don’t know. I can’t help think that I would’ve been better adjusted had things gone down differently.

Couple this with the insane paradigm I picked up from mom’s side of the family: my uncle, the eldest, has been the driving force for keeping the family together. He was the one who came to America first, making money, and sending it home so that his younger brothers and sisters could get educated. I owe too much to this guy. (Again, there’s the Tagalog phrase utang na loob. He’s always been like a second father to me. But the catch phrase—the code word— in our family has always been “sacrifice.”

Add to this the family legend of my granduncle who fought in WWII and who ended up dying in the Bataan Death March. After Liberation, the U.S. government paid my grandfather an indemnity for his brother’s death. This was the seed money that allowed my uncle even to come over to the U.S.

So early on, I got it drilled into my head that my role as the eldest in the family was to (1) sacrifice myself for my brother and my sister (2) be the glue that holds the family together.

This is not a realistic task for a 30 year old man, much less an 8 year old kid.

My mom likes to blame herself for my disordered state of mind, specifically, for letting us be latchkey kids and making me watch my brother and my sister. Well, for one thing, in retrospect, I think my mom had major depressive disorder, but that’s another story I guess.

Like I said, I was 8, and my brother was 4. My sister was 3. There is this humorous anecdote where my brother and I didn’t have keys to get into the house, and he had to take a shit. So I found a planter and had him crap in it, and then went out to the yard to bury it. But anyway. I mean, both my parents worked, and my mom worked a pretty screwed up schedule: from 3pm to 11pm. So this meant that me, my brother, and my sister were left unattended from 3pm until 6pm when my dad got home. Somehow we managed to not burn the house down or get anyone killed. Despite that episode when my sister found a handaxe and chased us down with it, but that’s another story.

Don’t get me wrong. I think these stories are inescapable elements of my character, and I’d lose a lot if I never experienced them, but, like I said, for the longest time, I looked for a stable family structure when there wasn’t one. Not the worst experiences in the world by far, but, when you’re 8, everything gets magnified. I mean shit, my oldest friends’ parents were getting divorced about the same time, so what do I have to complain about? And he’s far better adjusted to life than I am.

This, however, is probably the origin of my habit of worrying about things I have absolutely no control over. This has never done me any good, and is the source of great frustration in the few friends that I have remaining.

The ironic thing is now that I’m freaking 30 years old, this is probably the most stable my nuclear family has ever been. Sure, if you leave us together for more than 48 hours, one of us is liable to want to kill another one of us, but, really, it’s kind of cute. All five of us actually went to Vegas together in August. Sure, we don’t all get along all the time, but I think we get along a lot easier than we used to. I mean, when were little kids, there were always shifting alliances between me, my brother, and my sister. I guess that’s the beauty of having three kids in a family: you learn how to be Machiavellian pretty early on. Me and my brother would have frequent alliances against my sister, and our job became making sure she never got her way. (And still, she managed to prevail against us on multiple occasions.) And other times, my brother and my sister, who are only 14 months apart in age, would team up on me and try to drag me down, mostly because of the privileges I would earn for being older, like being able to drive, or go out late, things like that, but partly because I basically pretended they didn’t exist when I was a teenager. I don’t recall any occasions where me and my sister ever ganged up on my brother, but sometimes there would just be three way enmities and utter chaos, and sometimes we’d manage to drag our parents into the mess (almost always guaranteeing either an ass-whooping or deprivation of privileges, or frequently, both.) And my dad, honestly, is not above throwing a temper tantrum himself.

But mostly, I guess I can’t help but look at 0x41 and 0x45’s family and feel envy. I mean, I’m really happy for them. Being around them and their kids cheer me up a great deal. Being around them is probably the closest that I’ll get to a stable family situation devoid of below-the-surface antagonism just waiting to be provoked (as is the case of my family. No, I love them all, really. I’m serious.) I look at their family and always think to myself: that’s what I want.

No, I know it’s not an easy thing to have a family. First of all, it’s not an easy thing to have a marriage. I think of myself in such a situation, and despite all the somewhat unexpected things I’ve managed to accomplish in my life, I cannot imagine myself in their shoes. Well, I guess part of this is because I don’t have a significant other—clearly that is the key for having a successful family—but I’d be a mess, and I’d be guaranteed to scar any putative children I’d spawn for life.

I’m content to bask in the warm glow of their family-ness (if there is such a thing.) I suspect that’s as close as I’ll be getting without something miraculous happening to me.

(I couldn’t figure out where to stick this interesting tidbit of information, so I’ll say it here: it is rather fitting that I was so crushing on 0x41 since way back when, and in all honestly, I’m not sure I’m over her rejection of me. I’m not so completely insane as to imagine that this means anything at this ridiculously late juncture, other than that I’m a pretty sad and pathetic character, but there it is. I’m also not so entirely deranged to think that things would’ve turned out swimmingly for me had she decided otherwise way back when. I am, ultimately, one fucked up dude after all.)

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I wish I were a kid again, and I guess in a lot of ways emotionally speaking, I am a kid.

I haven’t had a real relationship since my second year in college, and how real can that be? We were basically kids anyway. I’ve had a ton of crushes since, and I’ve acted on them to varying degrees, and all to ill effect. The closest I’ve come to a relationship was this murky situation I found myself in a few years back. Depending on which witnesses you interview, it may or may not have been a relationship. The principals in the situation (me and the woman involved) agree that it wasn’t, but, well, that may well be entirely revisionist history, but I’ll leave it at that.

These days, I am basically living a quite monastic life. I don’t go out. I don’t meet people. There is definitely an element of social phobia creeping in. Mostly, I stare at this stupid screen and listen to iTunes, at least if I’m not at work.

Today I just had this brief glimmer of my place in this world: on the periphery of the periphery of the periphery, sitting on the godforsaken edge of a nondescript spiral galaxy, on an unremarkable piece of rock orbiting a rather ordinary star, on the edge of where the sea meets the land, in a city that’s not a city. And with this glimmer, I just got this feeling that I’m missing something.

There is something big missing in my life, and I have absolutely no clue what it is, much less how to get it into my life. The facile thing to imagine is that there is a person-sized hole in my soul, but I feel like this emptiness is more profound than that. There is something missing inside me that would make me a real person.

Good God, I’m the Velveteen Rabbit.

Or maybe Pinocchio.

I guess there is something to the idea that maybe I’m some sad character in someone’s rather warped novel. (Like I’ve said, I’ve been compared to Sidney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities and Miles from “Sideways.”) Or perhaps I’m an apparition in someone’s dream. Not quite completely fleshed out, but real enough, and worried about the dreamer eventually waking.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. — Arthur Dent’s thoughts from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

In moments of grandiloquence, maybe I’m a figment of God’s imagination, but I’ve been in a protracted crisis of faith for the past 6 years, and I had one moment of drug-induced communion and enlightenment about 2 years ago, but not a peep since. I’m pretty close to giving up on hearing from Him/Her again, but I will keep hoping though.

Only hope can keep me together. Love can mend your life, but love can break your heart. — The Police “Message in a Bottle”

Hope is the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. Without hope, I would’ve killed myself a long time ago.