It hit me the other night that I really don’t have anything to live for. I don’t have any family or close friends or lovers, I no longer have any real dreams, and all I have to my name is about $16,000 of debt. I’ve tried so hard to fix myself, to change things, but I don’t think I have the strength, and if I did I don’t think I even care any more. To what end? Another endless day of feeling empty and subhuman.

I feel like I try so hard. It’s felt so hard. I feel I’ve had to teach myself everything and I’m not enough. My father left when I was young, my mother wasn’t interested and also had Dissociative Identity Disorder. She would use me for emotional support and companionship until she had a partner, and then I would be abandoned, and also at the mercy of the partner’s mental and physical abuse. Always a joke, fat and weird.

I stopped living with her and her new partner when I was 16. I’m now 36 and I feel like a complete failure. All I ever wanted was someone safe, somewhere safe, but I feel as a man I am just seen as disposable. Because I wasn’t able to stop these things happening to me, because I couldn’t overcome it, I failed to become a man and therefore worthless.

I’ve done so much to fix it. I’ve lost a lot of weight, started lifting, gotten fit, improved diet, done a lot of therapy, started taking meds, gotten a little place to myself, gotten a job I don’t mind, cut out toxic people, tried to make peace with the past, put myself out there, tried making friends, asked people out, gone on dates, changed my lifestyle, changed my habits, started a business, focused on giving love, worked on self love, gotten sunshine, worked on gratitude, created my own meaning, amor fati.

And I am dead inside.