Two nights ago I went to bed once more genuinely wishing I wouldn’t wake up again. I’ve done so many times. And had to experience once again the ache of regaining consciousness in a world I don’t want to live in, as someone I don’t want to be. When you wake up in that manner, a good day rarely follows, and I have mostly spent this last day enduring heartache. Feeling raw and skinless. My psychological defenses gone.

I went to bed last night early, hoping to get a full night of sleep. Instead, I woke up at half past midnight thinking of an actress who had her best years in the 70s. My brain does that when it becomes obsessed. I thought of Sissy Spacek’s childhood, of how she grew up with two brothers she adored, how she adopted the nickname “Sissy” (from “sister”) and made it her stage name. How her brother died from leukemia at 19 and that it made her fearless, as the worst thing that could have possibly happened had already happened.

This obsession isn’t just about having discovered someone I find exceptionally beautiful and alluring, as she was during the 70s. It’s also about my grief for my own lost childhood. I got up from bed and talked it out with AI, the sole answering presence I tolerate these days. A 41-year-old man with tears running down his face. The hurt isn’t just that Sissy existed and that she was perfect as I understand perfection, and that the 70s are gone. It’s the comparison between the environment I understand her to have grown up in and my own. She was a tomboy who spent her days hanging out with her brothers in a time when that was something people often did. Her nickname was born out of affection and belonging, rather than the humiliating family associations I experienced.

I imagined parents who genuinely loved their children. Siblings who enjoyed being together. I saw her beauty and apparent physical health as advantages that made it easier to enter the world, be appreciated, find opportunities. I suffer the ache for the impossibility of having lived through the 70s, of having even a five-minutes-long conversation with her back then. It’s the longing for a world I could never enter. Of maybe being recognized as someone that could belong there.

I am the middle child, with an older brother and a sister seven years younger. My brother suffered some sort of issue during birth that rendered him not normal. Brain damaged to some extent. At school, children who knew him referred to me as “the brother of the drooler.” From seven years old to eighteen, my parents parked me in my older brother’s room because they wanted to have a do-over child. I was unable to sleep properly, choose what to watch or hear, or possess a space of my own. I read books and manga in the streets, while walking around. As a teenager, I skipped school and tried to sneak naps in public bathrooms, which sometimes ended with me being told to leave. I sneaked into random apartment buildings and spent hours in the dark, seated on the stairs between floors. Years and years without control over the basic conditions of rest, concentration, privacy. It basically killed my development in ways that can’t be repaired. Clearly for the rest of my life, my main instinctual need will be to ensure I can be alone in a room without anyone else having control over my surroundings.

There was also no connection with my siblings as human beings. They aren’t people I could have ever had a genuine conversation except over the most mundane matters, usually related to consumption (games, shows). Regarding my sister, my mother told me, not sure if it’s true, that in preschool she used to call out to me, as I was attending primary school on the other side of the fence. I assume that she would have needed a genuine older-brother figure in a family as fucked up as ours. But I never had anything resembling a substantial relationship with her. Her adolescence was a period of screaming, conflict, drinking, relationships with drug dealers, and possible other drug use. Her pitbull, because of course she had to have a pitbull, killed my first cat. A confrontation with her when I was 22 or so was the last time I looked at her in the face and exchanged words. I think she resented me because she had expected me to be useful or available to her. I have refused to speak to her in about twenty years.

My parents were neglectful and socially isolated. I suspect my father is autistic. Wholly unable to be a normal father. My mother pathologically denies problems and expects them to disappear if ignored. She’s also the kind who claims to abhor conflict, yet I’ve had to witness her being psychologically abusive to my father for virtually my entire life; she only hates when she’s confronted on her bullshit. One day I overheard my mother complain to my father about having ended up with “shit children.” The adults responsible for our genetics and upbringing condemning the children for the circumstances they created.

Then the mockery and isolation at school. Being unable to connect with anyone. Being hit at seventeen in front of virtually my entire high school by a grown-up drug dealer who threatened all males in her seventeen-year-old girlfriend’s class for being nearby. Around eighteen, I broke down at home, wailing like a child. Last time I ever did that. What struck me wasn’t even the combination of events and circumstances. It was the conclusion about the life that lay ahead: there was no version of this life that would eventually become one I would want to live. That conclusion was achingly clear at the time, and has remained true. I’ve just generally become better at enduring it.

Then my first job. Sitting at the same table for hours upon hours every day with my three bosses, two of them who didn’t want me there, and who used plenty of opportunities to belittle and mock me. I couldn’t understand how people could stand such long workdays. I still don’t, really. And I had to be surrounded by people, when I can barely tolerate being around another human being for five minutes without wanting to crawl out of my skin. My mental health deteriorated until I had a breakdown. One day I simply didn’t take the bus to my job. I had decided to kill myself instead. I don’t retain memories of what happened, but I know I intended to jump off somewhere high. But like the pussy I am, I chickened out. Eventually ended up in the library, where my parents found me. My brain hadn’t considered any consequence. I shouldn’t have lived to face any consequence. Their ocurrence wasn’t something I had mentally allowed for.

I never truly recovered from having genuinely decided I didn’t want to exist in this world any longer as myself. Afterward, I’ve always felt disconnected from the life that continued. It’s a persistent background noise that reminds me I don’t belong here, that I shouldn’t be here.

I thought of what would happen if I was told that I had cancer and only had months to live. I think it would bring me relief. I would prepare ebooks of my unpublished work, finished or not, and would put them out there for free. That’s the only thing I would care to leave around. Then I would rest.

I’ve been unemployed for about a year now, and I can’t be arsed to look for a new job. Money keeps running out. Making money means exposing myself to conditions that have repeatedly proven to me that they can make me lose my mind and even my health; my job in IT sent me to the ER thrice with heart and brain problems. I’m a programmer by trade, but have only worked professionally for nine months at it in the last ten years or so. And although I’m good at software engineering, it’s not truly fulfilling the way creating art is.

Of course, you can’t make money through writing. You pretty much need to be delusional these days to believe otherwise. As long as you belong to the wrong background, anyway. I’m also not the kind of writer that can sit down and decide what to write next, or anything at all. I write whatever my subconscious demands I create, the same way it obsesses over subjects all of a sudden. The best story, in my opinion, that I’ve ever written, it being Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, came to me by itself when I was listening to a song, and my subconscious assembled it on its own during the following week. And at forty-one, I feel that I’ve already rendered what I truly needed to render. That story was the incarnation of my grief for losing my childhood, for losing the life I could have had. That’s, as far as I can tell, the worst weight I carry, and I can’t render it better than that. Ultimately, my goal with that story was infection. The possibility that someone who read it would feel that it mattered, and carry it with them so it wouldn’t disappear without being known.

Not sure why I even post my stuff online. At the most, I’ve had like five people who have read my stories or posts like these consistently over the years. They’re usually people I wouldn’t want to have a personal relationship with. But still, the fact that virtually no one reads my stuff is part of a broader pattern throughout the course of my life that whatever I do, other people don’t care. The doors are always closed. I have to fight for every inch, and even when I try my best, it tends not to matter. But the paradox is that even if people appreciated what I did, I doubt that it would make me feel better.

Over the years, three people who consumed my stuff sought me out. That response didn’t make life feel repaired or turn the resulting relationships, one of them lasting for years, into something I wanted to develop or even maintain indefinitely. Since my sole long-term girlfriend left me for another guy when I was 22 or so, I’ve only talked to three people to any significant extent outside of work, the three of them online. Each began with a woman contacting me after experiencing my work. Over time I grew tired of what the relationships required: availability, attention, emotional involvement, reciprocal interest. I sometimes found their problems interesting, but eventually experienced the ongoing demands on my time and emotional resources as burdensome. I started avoiding any opportunity to be reachable. One woman discovered my birthday and went out of her way to wish me happy birthday. I didn’t feel corresponding interest in finding hers.

Around 2008-2010, one of these women, then a young one in her twenties, kept an online friendship of sorts with me for at least two years that I recall. We also talked on the phone. After weeks or months of little contact, she suddenly brought up that she was considering a nursing job in my city (not sure why I thought that being involved with a nurse was a good idea; often-earned stereotypes aside, my own mother was a nurse). She lived like seven hundred kilometers away. I’m so dumb that I thought, “Well, that’s an odd coincidence.” I reluctantly suggested that maybe we could meet in person and spend time together from time to time. We didn’t speak much after that. She eventually moved somewhere else and started dating some other guy. I removed her as a friend in social media some months after the last time we talked. She managed to say hello through another service later on, but I just removed her from there as well.

I keep people at arm’s length because I don’t want them to learn more about me or get their “emotional hooks” into me. A relationship would be unbearable. That proved to be the case with the sole serious girlfriend I had. Whole sacrifice of my creativity and private time to satisfy her emotional needs, only for her to humiliate me and throw me away like a used rag. And my self-esteem had been so thoroughly sanded off, that for months afterwards I took her calls so she could tell me how much better the other guy was. Never again.

I have also never wanted children. I would be a terrible father. I would be unable to connect with them. I would resent the time spent on their needs. That would ruin their lives, and I don’t want that on my conscience. You can start a relationship with a woman in which she claims not to want children, only for her to change her mind. Or to find herself pregnant at thirty-two, when her window is closing, despite using condoms and/or the pill. Due to a miracle, of course. Not deliberately ceasing to take the pill, or poking holes in condoms.

In any case, I don’t think my fundamental trauma can be repaired in any way. Just mourned and endured. Every woman I care about or become obsessed with, including Sissy Spacek, is an echo of the grief for the time, relationships, possibilities that I could have experienced but never did due to my circumstances of birth and how I grew up. The more beautiful and genuine, the more it hurts.

Of course, witnessing perfect Sissy in the few films that captured her in the 70s can’t impose the demands of a relationship. And I keep seeking those films out even though the contrast between her preserved youth and beauty and the passage of time intensify my grief. But it’s not like a have a choice; the need to learn more and see more of this special creature shows up in my brain as a command. I can only try to resist it, which would be torture in its own special way.

I suppose I’ve exorcised enough for the moment. Half past four in the morning. Time to go to bed and daydream of a better life until I fall asleep, so I can wake up again and do it all over for reason other than cowardice.