late nights and sleepy days

I. Sometimes, I wonder if neurotypicals have brains that are noisy too. I wonder if people with regular brains have the same sort of constant, overlapping buzzing inside their heads: thinking about both everything and nothing all at once, unable to sleep at night because the brain noise is too loud.

II. Everything is made of fog. I feel overwhelmed and want to leave a room to self-isolate, and my body won't move. I'm frozen in place, staring into space, kind of fading into the background like a ghost. I don't hate that I'm asocial. I hate the way social conditioning makes me feel about it. Humans are meant to be social creatures - to feel lonely when they're isolated, to crave connection and companionship, to build a life surrounded by love and affection. But people are made of clouds, and I can walk right through them without being seen at all.

III. Emotions are strange. Often I feel as though I don't have any at all. I feel blank: a plain slate, never quite understanding the reactions of other people. I am deeply broken, but it wasn't always like this. In my younger days, I obsessed over those who couldn't care less for me at all, and craved the attention of those who were bad for me. I struggle to feel like a human, and live like a ghost - unknown to everyone, existing among the rest without really seeming to exist at all. Sometimes I feel as though I live separately from my body, either feeling nothing or detaching from myself when feeling much of anything else.

IV. I have no goals in life. I can't imagine or even care to imagine where I'll be at in life five years from now. I don't know why it matters so much to have a grand life plan or ambition: life doesn't exist beyond this Exact Current Moment, and things never turn out the way you want them to anyway. Getting to know people was always intimidating and unfulfilling, but it used to be tolerable, and now it feels like a waste of time. I never wonder what goes on in people's lives. I don't know the names of my relatives' partners or friends. They're all just people I'm obligated to spend time with: and nobody I care to know. I spend time with family because it's expected of me, but it feels like a chore, and I don't know when things turned out this way.

V. Maybe it's depression. That's what people say, anyway. I watch myself do things and survive: watching life pass by without participating or enjoying it at all. Maybe all this time, I've never existed outside of my own head. It feels strange, leaving the house. We all exist on some sort of superficial level, two-dimensional characters in the lives of others. I daydream about vivid life experiences and people, but never care to live them outside of my head.

VI. Something I didn't understand until very recently is that when I think someone is overreacting, or being dramatic, or attention-seeking, they're really just having a normal human reaction to emotional stimuli: because humans are meant to feel things, and I can't understand why other people don't feel nothingness like I do. Sometimes I don't know how to feel at all until somebody tells me.

VII. I don't know how anyone can bear to be around me. I don't laugh at your jokes or care about your problems. I don't want to spend time with the people I'm supposed to care about most unless it's on my terms, and my schedule. But the entire world doesn't revolve around my personal schedule. I wasn't always an asshole. I'm not really sure when I became one.