Something I don't talk about very often at all is myself. That's why these blogs wear thin, and when I do them, I typically try to talk about something I'm engaged with and discuss that rather than myself. But a blog can be anything, and today I want to talk about my struggle with sadness. I do not want to call it depression to take away from people actually diagnosed with such a thing, but I do have a habit of not seeking help when I probably need it. Actually, most of the men in my family are the same way. It's just the way that I was raised. Rather than going to the doctor, you try to fix it yourself, because money doesn't come easy. But there's no price on being healthy even in the face of that I would say.
To put things into perspective at the time of writing, I've just turned 24. I had a pretty good childhood I would think. It was fairly balanced between hunting with my dad and using computers which I had gotten interested in from my mom. We had an HP Pavilion with Windows XP that I spent a lot of time on, playing a lot of those old WildTangent games, Gold Miner Vegas, and Chicken Hunter. As I got older I got into more advanced games like Roblox at the end of '08 and Flash games. I think a lot of the oldest zoomers can relate to this. At a young age I always wanted to make my own games, but I never really put into the time to learn how to program. The biggest stain on my childhood had to be losing my dad to cancer when I was just 11 years old. From that point on, there was a hole in me. Seeing your own father who was in good shape and healthy slowly die from something you may very well have yourself one day is something that a child that age will never forget. From that point on I've had imposter syndrome, feeling as though I'm nothing like him. Probably the biggest reason for this is that I never really acted interested in spending time with him while he was sick, I was in my own world at that age. My mom assures me that he understood this, but to put yourself in my shoes it's hard to know anything. I was so young then, and to add insult to injury while I learned from my mistake of not spending time with my dad to spend more time with my grandfather, who become my role model at that point, he would pass away in a similarly traumatic way when I turned 16.
At this point the walls had begun to close in on me. For school, my younger school years were fantastic, but junior high and high school were a completely different story. In the age of the internet, one stupid thing or influence from others when you're that young can really hurt yourself. There were things which were "cool" online back then but not cool to anyone else which stuck around for years. I became a laughing stock, someone who people were only friends with when it was convenient for them. For that and many other reasons, by the time I was a senior, I was ready to get out to never see any of them again. It turned me away from college to where I didn't really try my hardest, I just tried to get by with as little friction as possible. I quit going after a few years but it's come to bite me in the ass, leading me back there today.
We graduated during COVID so we kind of got let off the hook early; at the same time the past 5 years have been the darkest ones of my entire life. Never have I ever felt so empty with no sense of direction, no clue what I'm going to be doing for a living or why I should even do it. I've never had a girlfriend and my biggest asset so far has to be cutting meat while my former classmates are married and working at their dream jobs. Still, I'm aware there's people worse off than me. I could be overweight, I could have been born in a war-torn country or a poverished one, I could be smoking the damn cigarattes instead of inhaling my moms all day, but I still feel as though there's no place for me in this world. At the very least I have a house, my dog, and the various projects (small in the grand scheme of things) in which I work on. I just hope to one day pass these hurdles but I have to constantly move the goal post as the days, weeks, and months go by, resetting all the "progress" in which I pretend to make. It's a shame I'm afraid of death but maybe it's actually a blessing. All I can really hope for is that I get the energy to do something about my problems one day, to build bridges, to actually be a man for once, but as it sits I have very little energy to accomplish anything aside from eking out a barely substantial life. That's all. God help me.