"Nobody cares about you."

My dad said this to me a few days before my last birthday. He has a special ability to make me unhappy.

His comment has really stuck in my head. He's right too in spirit. Few people care for me.

As anyone might imagine, taking this comment onbaord has made me unhappy. I've started smoking skunk again and have been drinking heavily. There's been some internal sobbing as the comment bore through my psyche.

It was the last thing I needed to feel about my life and my self but, perhaps, it was important that it happened. The worst of the misery: I'm still alive.

Why was it important? It makes me question myself and my being.

I don't have a lot of positive feelings about myself. I seek evidence and the evidence is I'm a poor, lonely failure who's basically a useless addict most of the time. What little good I do is a pathetic attempt to overcome the abject futility of my life.

Why does no one...welll....few people care about me and why am I so alone? This is an important question to ask, as is the question of why I want to be cared about and not alone however I'm chosing not to explore this second question.

I could simply answer "because I'm mentally ill" but that's a weak answer. It too easily leads to giving up. It doesn't explain enough nor drill into the useful information.

I am suicidal. This has changed me. It makes any sort of connecting harder. It means I've also gotten used to hiding what's inside me. A suicidal person can't live in this world as they are because of the taboo of suicide and the deep rooted dismissal of a person's individual suffering as either a mental illness and therefore something to be dealt with by a doctor or too time consuming and emotional to bother with.

I am an intense person under my veneer. The veneer was much thicker before and fooled lots of people until they got to know about my depths. The facile, jokey and fun person some people know me is as is sometimes a genuine presentation of who I am and how I feel but at other times it's just a facade to get along in this world.

It probably looks false when I don't feel the way my facade displays and this may alienate people because they see me as false, difficult to understand or some other negative caused by having to act rather than be.

Perhaps its because I'm hard to care about. I am bloody minded. I take risks and often don't listen to advice in the rare occassions I ask for it or help of any form. My pride and my resilience mean I'm not good at accepting help and value battling it out alone, no matter how hard it is nor what little positive reward I get from this way of being. This is a difficult way to be if a person wants to be cared about.

I'm also boring. This has become more of an issue lately. I talk about boring stuff. In the right company this can be okay but out with friends on a Friday night it can be difficult. While they're joking away and talking about frivilities I'm talking about stuff which is more like work than play. The deep intensity can also be difficult for other people do they enjoy social contact with me less than if I was like them.

But, perhaps, the hard truth is that I don't care for many other people. I'm selfish and inward focused. I care for abstract labels of groups and types, for example the poor or homeless or disabled or whatever, but am poor at connecting with and caring for real people.

The next step, I guess, is change.

The question I didn't answer was why this matters. For me it is simple in that it doesn't need to be answered more than to say I love company. I love been with people and feeling like part of something.

Instead I spend my days drinking alone in the park.

Sent from my smartphone