I cannot name the misery that I feel at the moment. It has no outright and obvious cause. Just the perpetual draining away of hopes and possibilities.

In the months since I was last here, I’ve been learning to find satisfaction in the simple things that are always with us and cost us nothing. This has been largely successful for me, and I have felt quite balanced and contented. But I am rocked again now by more bills that we cannot pay, more problems with the car that we cannot fix and the ongoing curtailment of my dreams.

To dream is everything. To live as a bird with it’s wings clipped is torture.

In this state of existence, I feel further and further removed from other people who seem to be ‘out there’ living their lives. I become more paranoid and isolated, unable to feel any connection with them at all.

I do not know what to do. And the more I allow this to consume me, the more damage it does to my brain chemistry. Worry becomes incessant ruminating, becomes depression and then despair.

There is a limit to how much I can take. When I think about the future, I don’t think about where life might take me. I think about how I will end it when the time comes.

She feels like family to me, because she knows me and accepts me as I am and doesn’t place any expectations on me to be or do something different.

We talked over a long lunch recently, about how people often try to put their agenda upon you. I’ve come to feel that 98% of human relationships are about power, and who has power over whom. Some people only want to connect with you if you will submit to having their agenda put upon you, and what appears to be the nicest of friendships can puddle along like this for years.

Some people have made the mistake of assuming that I’m the submissive type because I’m quiet and cautious, a little nervous, reserved. I just believe it’s my inalienable right to protect my space and be myself whether they like it or not, and that it’s the height of fucking rudeness to expect me to fall into line with their idea of who I am.

One old friend recently accused me of using her as a verbal punch-bag because I spoke up about how she was hurting my feelings, after more than two years of being on the receiving end of her unspoken resentment and anger. I have never hurled accusations at her, or stooped to shaming and name-calling, only sought to question her about what had gone wrong, to try to understand the situation. But for sharing my part, my hurt and my truth, she cast me out. And wrapped it in a melodrama of lies about how she’d begged and begged me to meet up to talk. She hadn’t. She’d given me an ultimatum, once. Uneasy with these kind of deals, I’d turned it down.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t really seek to influence others, and that I’m unwilling to fall into line with any female pack I’ve met so far in life, that I don’t have many friends. But when I have friends like her, that accept me completely as I am, I’m willing to sacrifice quantity for a bit of quality. It’s so completely worth it in the end.