I am a Navy Brat. I have lived in three countries, went to 14 different schools, graduated high school in a Department of Defense School in Japan, and I never had any friends. And I mean EVER.
Always being the new kid gets old fast. After the initial week of two of “something new”, kids quickly ostracized me, bullied and mentally abused me, and no one wanted to be my friend. How can I be accepted when kids have been in school together since kindergarten in most places I lived? And when somebody is different kids are malicious.
The entire time that I was in school I never once had a best friend, or even a friend at all. The other kids would be sure to keep me separated from everyone else: eating lunch alone, sitting in class alone, kids outright refusing to be my partner for class assignments, having my lock on my locker superglued shut, having it set on fire, being shot with bb guns between classes, assaulted in hallways and locker rooms, being completely ignored as if I didn’t existed by everyone at whatever school I was at. The trauma goes on.
And it carried on into adulthood. The scars of abuse and trauma run deep and in the silence of being alone in my apartment for days at a time with zero human contact, I am reminded of how nobody wants anything to do with me as a human being.
At this part of my life I do have a couple of casual friends. Ones I see and talk to every week or so, some months. But no one wants to visit. No one wants to hang out with me. No one even wants to talk to me on the phone or text. And it is NOT from a lack of trying. Believe me I have tried to make friends my entire life. And every suggestion a well meaning person offers me, I have tried and failed at a dozen or more times and places.
There is something about me that repulses people. Nobody will tell me what it is. I have been told, not too long ago, that they wished they could find a person just like me to date. I, being single and willing to date that person, am not worthy of their love and affection. They don’t want me. Always, I am friend zoned soon after meeting a new person (like within minutes many times). Never EVER being given a chance.
That is what I live with, and am reminded of every second that ticks by in my empty home, my every waking moment. And in my dreams I don’t always escape the aloneness and isolation. I can’t even make friends in my dreams.
So here I sit. I am at my computer. There is no music playing, there is no noise in the background except passing traffic. I am tired. I am tired of being alone.
I have been alone my entire life with few times in between where there was, briefly, someone to share my life with. But everyone eventually abandons me, ghosts me, tosses me away. I have come to expect it from every person I meet. It isn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy that I make happen, it just is.
Miyamoto Mushashi, a master swordsman and Ronin in feudal Japan who won over 60 duels to the death, on the hour before his death wrote Dokkodo: The Path of Aloneness. 21 proverbs based on his lifelong experience of walking alone by his own choice in order to become the greatest swordsman in all of Japan. He lived a life dependent on nobody but himself.
I was forced to live dependent on no one. I didn’t not choose this life for me. It was shoved upon me. And now, as the years ahead of me are shorter than the years behind me, I have no hope or expectation of that ever changing.
I expect to die alone.
The Bipolar DM 