Waiting is not Living in New Beginnings

There's one thing that bothers me about my home. Pictures. That is, the lack of pictures is what bothers me. My walls are so bear. I've hung my college diplomas, and I even bought a few pieces of art to hang in my bathrooms, but it still feels a bit like an asylum. I suppose I could keep buying art to hang on the walls, but even so, it doesn't feel like an actual person lives here. Rather, it feels almost like a condo that's been staged. Actually, it feels like a condo that's been lazily staged. Even if I were to put up some photos with those stock family pictures, my place would feel like a place where an actual human being lives. It would be an illusion, but at least the feeling would be real.

I've never been a particularly outgoing. Well, I've always been socially awkward and anxious. Of course, my anxiety helped made me the pariah of my classmates year after year after year, and eventually I just sort of accepted it as my lot. Every weekend was spent in either watching T.V or playing video games while everyone else was hanging out with their friends, having fun, flirting with potential girlfriends, making out with actual girlfriends, playing bikini-twister (that's what ya'll were doing, weren't you? It's not like I have my own experiences to invalidate that suspicion).

In my latter half of high school, I tried to make friends by becoming involved in my church's high school ministry. I joined the choir, I attended the Wednesday night youth services, but I just couldn't fit in. It's like the cliques had been formed, and I wasn't welcome. I didn't help matters. I was so awkward that what few times I did get invited to a social function I had no idea what to do. I basically just sat by myself while everyone else laughed and talked and so forth. My thought process at those times must have been, "what are they talking about? What am I supposed to say? Am I privy to whatever they're talking about, or will they just shut me out if I try to join in? That's usually what they do. At least if I sit here and do nothing, I they can't reject me."

Even my best (and for a long time, only) friend, Greg, shut me out. Greg and I had been friends since we were toddlers, but we went to different schools, so he had an entire social world I wasn't a part of. I did get glimpses into it. When we'd lift weights together, he'd tell me about whatever adventure he and his friends had recently experienced. I would listen and laugh, but listening to his stories did more to provoke my loneliness than provide vicarious relief. I was dying for him to include me. I even hinted my joining them a few times, but those suggestions went in one ear and out the other. Maybe Greg didn't think I'd fit in with his friends, or maybe he didn't want to mix that social sphere with the sphere that included me. Maybe he was just too dense to realize what I was asking for. That latter possibility is very probable. For all Greg's talents, talents that seemed limitless at times, mental acuity wasn't always there.

College wasn't much different. I wasn so consumed with my studies, doing what I had to then so I'd have the resources to do whatever I wanted later. I learned to cope with the isolation. At times, I managed to convince myself I preferred it, but I always imagined that when I became a full fledged adult, when I was on my own with my own place and had complete control of my life, I'd actually go out and get a life.

It's been a long, rocky road getting to this point. My ordeal with my Dad was a huge set back, and my unemployment during the recession basically made me live almost as a complete shut in. After all that, though, I think I'm more comfortable in my chains. I can finally do things besides sit at home by myself, but I don't have the desire. All I want to do at the end of the day is come home to vegitate. I wouldn't be disturbed enough to even write this entry on the subject if I didn't see where this path would end up. Basically, it'll end up where I am right now. If I don't stop doing what I'm doing, 20 years from now I'll be living by myself in a home of blank walls, talking to myself (or my cats) to keep myself from feeling alone. My life will be unlived, and I don't want that to happen, but I can't for the life of me build up the resolve to change my trajectory.