It's surreal reading these old entries and all the comments. Each time I've moved on in my life, I've left everyone behind. I never felt socially connected. I'd forget everyone, because I was lost in my own world. It was never about other people or who they were. It was just me and my inability to engage with who anyone was. I wasn't interested in other people outside my own imagination.
I write in past tense because something seems to have changed. I'm not sure what to chalk it up to. Life has been all kinds of crazy. I started taking growth hormone again. I moved to Vermont. I did nothing for a few years, but met someone online that felt different. I felt connected, I felt capable of connection. It wasn't even romantic or anything, but when she found better things to do than chat with me every day, I realized with some desperation that it was time to go out into the world.
I threw everything I had at the problem. I started training in kickboxing and BJJ again. I started seeing a therapist and taking meds, eating healthy and intermittent fasting. I gave up coffee. I started going to community college. I started with a required intro course for my first semester, but went full-time for my second semester.
Jenny broke up with me a few years prior. She married someone else. A few years after that, she killed herself. That hit me pretty hard, but I kept going to classes and finished out the semester. I switched to going part time. I stumbled but was still doing well for the most part, with a 3.2 GPA.
A few semesters later, my father got cancer. I was going to visit him as often as I could at the expense of passing my latest courses. Started seeing an academic counselor, getting back on track the following semester, while still trying to make time for my father, as he went through chemo.
Then the pandemic happened. Living alone, everything shut down. For an agoraphobic like me, it was like a recovering alcoholic being forced to go back to drinking. I didn't know how afraid of covid to be, I was paralyzed not knowing how to handle any of it.
I don't have a car, and public transit shut down. I had no way to get to Massachusetts for months. My father was alone with his cancer. I knew how deadly that would be. I should have been able to come up with a solution, but I was a wreck.
About six months in, my sister took him to Hawaii, where she was living at the time. A few months after that, I finally got myself together enough to go visit them there. I stayed for a month, helping take care of him as he died. It was the most traumatic experience of my life.
I got home, and got myself back to the gym. I figured maybe I'd go back to college when in-person classes started up again. Six months later, I had cancer. Luckier than my father, I caught it early, before it spread at all. A 2cm adenocarcinoma in my colon, easy enough to remove. Two years and multiple invasive medical checkups later, I'm still cancer-free.
Screw college. I'm not sure I was really going anywhere anyhow. I'm getting older and don't know how much time I have left. Unable to train with people during the pandemic, I realized that getting to the gym was the most important thing I had. I realized that I wanted to enjoy what I can, while I can, and there's nothing I enjoy more than sparring and rolling with people.
Last year, the gym was holding a full-contact boxing/kickboxing event against fighters from other gyms. Like a competition, except without calling any winners, because the gym isn't licensed for that. An odd technicality, but here was my chance to try something like an actual fight. This was as low as the bar was going to get. I was so excited to get in on it.
The kickboxing coach shut me down. This is not like point sparring or a BJJ competition. It's not open to anyone that wants to give it a go, but only people who have been ok'd to fight. It never occurred to me that they'd tell me no. This is the only thing in the world I'm any good at and have any confidence about, are you kidding me? I was told I needed to work on my cardio, which didn't really add up. I don't want to get into all the details, but it had me obsessing over what the real reason was for months.
I had a number of theories, some more likely than others, but it changed the way I thought about myself. I felt shattered. How could my self-perception be so different than my coach's perception of me? From everyone's perception of me? Already crumbling, these long standing walls of self-deception collapsed around me.
For years, training acted as a sort of social buffer for me. I could socialize with my training partners without needing to talk all that much. I got to know lots of people, more than I ever have in my life, but it's only been in this past year or so that I've realized I have positive feelings for many of these people.
I feel connections with people. I care about them, I'm interested in who they are. It doesn't matter if they're "like me" -that had always been a wall keeping everyone out, where no one could judge me. I felt so small my entire life. To keep everyone from looking down on me, I lived my life on a whole other plane of existence, where I just needed to meet the right people. My people. Who never actually existed. It was all bullsh't.
I'm so sorry, everyone. I kept you all out. Even Jenny. I didn't care enough about who she was. I didn't even care who my father was. I tried so hard to figure out how to talk to people, but never listened. I was so cut off from literally everyone.. and I'm not anymore.